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February 2019

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Coups Cover-ups and Context by Linda Goudsmit

By on February 18th, 2019

http://goudsmit.pundicity.com/22366/coups-cover-ups-and-context
http://goudsmit.pundicity.com http://lindagoudsmit.com

After much media hype and online snippets the prime time CBS News interview of Andrew McCabe finally aired last night 2.17.19. It was a well-choreographed editorial hit-piece masquerading as journalism worthy of study by any legitimate journalism school if any still exist.

60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley interviewed McCabe for the show. Pelley handled McCabe with the deference, tenderness, and soulfulness of a dance partner, completely inappropriate for interviewing the disgraced former acting head of the FBI involved in an unprecedented coup attempt against President Donald J. Trump. CBS entertained America with their well-rehearsed dance sequence.

The stage is set for two. Pelley’s gentle voice leads McCabe as they tango around the political dance floor justifying motivations for removing the president. A dip here, a dramatic pause there.

McCabe, dressed in his best red white and blue dance costume takes the lead and reveals that he ordered an investigation into whether President Trump obstructed justice by firing FBI director James Comey. Dancing McCabe’s Tango Walks naturally curve to the left as he claims he initiated the probe to safeguard and document the ongoing investigations into Russian interference in the 2016 election so they could “not be closed or vanish in the night without a trace.”

Pelley turns and moves his partner in a different direction. McCabe follows for a Reverse Slip Pivot and in a staggering admission that has gone viral on the Internet but being virtually ignored by the mainstream media, McCabe describes how the Justice Department considered enacting the 25th amendment to remove President Trump from office.

Britain’s online newspaper The Independent reported on the admission in its stunning 2.15.19 article titled, “Trump 25th amendment: Justice Department considered attempt to remove president after Comey firing, former FBI chief reveals.”

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ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

The Democrat Socialist Party of Dhimmis By Victor Sharpe

By on February 18th, 2019

Let me first explain what a dhimmi is. It is an Arabic noun referring to a non-Muslim who becomes subject to Islamic servitude. Dhimmitude is the condition that dhimmis endure under such Islamic power and influence.

Back in 2006 I first wrote an article titled, Dhimmitude for Dummies, which was published in a conservative website. In it I attempted to warn about the terrible danger posed from stealth Islamic jihad infiltrating the Western world, threatening Judeo-Christian civilization and, in particular, menacing our very own United States of America.

Several years earlier, on that terrible day we know as 9/11, Islamic fanatics in the name of Allah destroyed the World Trade Center and struck the Pentagon using hi-jacked passenger planes as aerial bombs. They failed in their attempt to destroy the White House using yet another hi-jacked plane. All three aircraft were filled with doomed men, women and children.

This atrocity was a violent and vengeful act that was celebrated by millions of Muslims around the world. Who can forget the TV pictures of Palestinian Arabs handing out candies as they rejoiced while watching the iconic twin towers falling and thousands dying in agony.

The atrocious Islamic ‘success’ on 9/11 became a rallying war cry for untold millions of Muslims who saw in their fevered minds – and still do – an Islamic victory over a vanquished United States of America. For them it was a 21st century revenge by resurgent Islam over the so-called ‘infidels’ whose ancestors centuries earlier had beaten back the many previous Islamic invasions by Muslim hordes.

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BOOKS, EDUCATION Comments turned off

High Theory and Low Seriousness written by Gustav Jönsson

By on February 18th, 2019

https://quillette.com/2019/02/15/high-theory-and-

Sixty years ago today, just as Henderson the Rain King was going to print, Saul Bellow penned an article for the New York Times in which he warned against the perils of deep reading. Paying too close attention to hidden meanings and obscure symbols takes all the fun from reading, he wrote. The serious reader spends an inordinate amount of energy trying to find profound representations in the most trivial of details. “A travel folder signifies Death. Coal holes represent the Underworld. Soda crackers are the Host. Three bottles of beer are—it’s obvious.”

Moreover, deep reading is such an imprecise game that numerous dull and contradictory interpretations arise from the same passage. “Are you a Marxist? Then Herman Melville’s Pequod in Moby Dick can be a factory, Ahab the manager, the crew the working class. Is your point of view religious? The Pequod sailed on Christmas morning, a floating cathedral headed south. Do you follow Freud or Jung? Then your interpretations may be rich and multitudinous.” One man, Bellow wrote, had volunteered an explanation of Moby Dick as Ahab’s mad quest to overcome his Oedipus complex by slaying the whale—the metaphorical mother of the story.

Instead of this tedious attitude to literature, Bellow urged that people take after E. M. Forster’s lightness of heart. Forster had once remarked that he felt worried by the prospect of visiting Harvard since he had heard that there were many deep and serious readers of his books there. The prospect of their close analysis made him uneasy. In short, for Bellow and Forster, the average academic critic tried to understand literature and thus ruined the enjoyment of it.

The low seriousness that Bellow lamented has only increased since his complaint. Today, literary scholarship is home to some of the most impenetrable gobbledygook ever put on paper. The main culprit is easily identifiable: literary theory. Literary theory, a school of criticism with little hold outside the universities, has captured whole colleges and threatens to extinguish students’ love of reading. Imagine the dejection a student about to begin university, eager to read the best that has ever been written, feels when they are told to examine some heavy tome of unreadable theory. It drains all the fun from reading.

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POLITICS Comments turned off

Amy Klobuchar shoots herself in the foot with comments on the Aurora shooting By Thomas Lifson

By on February 18th, 2019

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/02/amy_klobuchar_shoots_herself_in_the_foot_with_comments_on_the_aurora_shooting.html

Only a week after launching her presidential campaign decrying global warming during a snowstorm in Minneapolis, the woman who wants to claim the mantle of a “moderate” Democrat has beclowned herself with a nonsensical statement. Even worse, as a veteran prosecutor — county attorney (D.A.) in the most populous county in Minnesota, responsible for all criminal prosecution — she missed a point squarely within her area of purported professional competence.

Screen grab from Twitter.

The Hill posted a video to Twitter of her campaigning in Eau Claire, Wisconsin (friendly territory not too far from the Minnesota border), claiming that the mass shooting in Aurora, Illinois shows that “It is time to put sensible gun control legislation in place.”

One problem: the shooter in Aurora was already prohibited by existing laws from having a firearm. The problem was that existing laws weren’t enforced. Via The Daily Wire:

During a Saturday press conference, Aurora Police Chief Kristen Ziman said that the suspect had previously been arrested on six separate occasions by the Aurora Police Department, “including arrests for traffic and domestic battery-related issues.”

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FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Ilhan Omar’s Big Lie By Rich Lowry

By on February 18th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/02/ilhan-omars-big-lie/The Left distorts what happened in El Salvador in the 1980s.

In a viral exchange at a congressional hearing last week, the new congresswoman from Minnesota, Ilhan Omar, who is quickly establishing herself as the most reprehensible member of the House Democratic freshman class despite stiff competition, launched into Elliott Abrams. She accused the former Reagan official and Trump’s special envoy to Venezuela of being complicit in war crimes.

“Yes or no,” she demanded, “would you support an armed faction within Venezuela that engages in war crimes, crimes against humanity or genocide, if you believe they were serving U.S. interest, as you did in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua?”

Omar was cribbing from the Left’s notes on U.S. Latin American policy, and doing it badly. She made much of the 1981 El Motoze massacre in El Salvador. The idea that Abrams is somehow directly implicated in this bloodcurdlingly awful event is completely absurd. He was assistant secretary of state for international organizations in the Reagan administration, then became assistant secretary of state for human rights and humanitarian affairs on December 10, 1981. The massacre occurred the next day. Unless we are to believe the El Salvadoran military unit took his change of jobs as a green light to indiscriminately kill villagers (which unfortunately was not a new practice), Abrams obviously had nothing to do with the massacre.

Nonetheless, the Omar attack is an opportunity to examine the premises of the Left’s narrative on Reagan’s policy in El Salvador, which supports the persistent attacks on Abrams as a “war criminal.” To paraphrase the famous Mary McCarthy line about Lillian Hellman, every word in this narrative is a lie, including “and” and “the.”

In what follows, I rely throughout on Russell Crandall’s book The Salvador Option: The United States in El Salvador, 1977–1992, a fair-minded, factual account that’s a marked contrast to the tendentiously left-wing material that dominates online.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

McCabe and 60 Minutes Avoid Discussing Why Russia Factored in Comey’s Firing By Andrew C. McCarthy

By on February 18th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/02/andrew-mccabe-60-minutes-avoid-discussing-why-russia-factored-in-james-comeys-firing/

Trump wanted Comey to state publicly what he had insinuated to the president privately: that Trump was not a suspect.

Andrew McCabe is a good witness and he made a favorable impression, at least on me, in his 60 Minutes interview with Scott Pelley. Pelley and his editors did a great job highlighting McCabe’s down-to-earth likability. Unlike Jim Comey, a career prosecutor and corporate lawyer before he became FBI director, former deputy director McCabe is a career agent; his relation of events smacks of the Bureau’s “just the facts, ma’am” ethos. And McCabe’s account of Trump telling him to ask his wife what it was like to be a “loser” (after she lost a Virginia state senate race) is devastating, precisely because it sounds just like something Trump would say.

That aside, there are problems with McCabe’s story.

First, Pelley failed to ask him the screamingly obvious questions: What about Russia did Trump want included in Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein’s memo supporting Comey’s dismissal? McCabe obliquely said Trump wanted Rosenstein “to put Russia in” the memo about Comey (I’m quoting from memory). But Pelley never asked what in particular about Russia Trump wanted included. What about Russia was Trump referring to when he spoke — in conversations with NBC News and Russian diplomats — of Russia’s part in Comey’s firing? Pelley highlighted the word “Russia,” but he sidestepped what Trump was concerned about regarding Russia.

The viewer was thus left to conclude, from McCabe’s other comments, that Trump must have fired the FBI director because he was fearful of the Bureau’s investigation of Russia’s interference in the election; because he was concerned that the FBI would find that Russia intended to benefit Trump and would therefore deduce that Trump was complicit.

But that is misleading. We know that what Trump wanted made public was something very specific about Russia, namely, that Comey repeatedly told the president he was not a suspect in the Russia investigation. Trump was frustrated — over time, ballistic — over the fact that Comey was privately telling him that he was not under investigation, yet making statements that would lead the public to believe Trump was suspected of conspiring in Russia’s hacking operations. Trump wanted Comey to state publicly that he was not a suspect; Comey’s refusal to do so made no sense to the president, especially after Comey gratuitously implied, in his stunning March 2017 House testimony, that Trump was a suspect.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Jason Chaffetz: FBI’s Andrew McCabe should be on trial, not a book tour

By on February 18th, 2019

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/jason-chaffetz-fbis-andrew-mccabe-should-be-on-trial-not-a-book-tour

Andrew McCabe lied multiple times to federal investigators.

That was the official finding in February 2018 of a scathing 39-page report by the Department of Justice (DOJ) Office of the Inspector General. They found McCabe, then Deputy Director of Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) “lacked candor” in answering questions about his authorization of disclosures in the Hillary Clinton email investigation. The referral for further action went to the DOJ.

One year later he is publishing a book, being highlighted on CBS’ “60 Minutes,” and walking free after lying at least four times, three of them under oath, to federal authorities investigating his conduct. Trading on the notoriety he gained from his partisan loyalty, he will now have the opportunity to monetize the duplicity that shielded Hillary Clinton from justice.

For a time, McCabe was the acting director of the FBI. He of all people knew the rules, the law, and had a duty and responsiblity to tell the truth.

In stark contrast, the subjects of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigations have been shown no such favor. Several are being prosecuted for lying to federal authorities. Much to my surprise, Mueller actually managed to get the DOJ to prosecute someone for lying to Congress – former Trump attorney Michael Cohen. That is a promising development.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

A Labour Revolt Against Corbyn Seven MPs bolt over anti-Semitism and Brexit abdication.

By on February 18th, 2019

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-labour-revolt-against-corbyn-11550508910

A British political party splintered on Monday, and for once it wasn’t the ruling Conservatives. Seven members of the Labour opposition resigned from the party in protest over leader Jeremy Corbyn’s inconstant dealing on Brexit and tolerance for anti-Semitism.

The rebel Members of Parliament include Chuka Umunna, the party’s former spokesman on business affairs, and Luciana Berger, who has endured anti-Semitic abuse by Corbyn supporters. All seven have held senior party positions and hail from the centrist wing in charge during the Tony Blair era. They aren’t forming a new political party and will keep their seats while voting as independents.

All seven cited the excuse-making of Mr. Corbyn and his allies regarding abuse of Jewish members, spread of anti-Jewish tropes and sympathy for anti-Israel terrorists. The number of such cases referred to the party for disciplinary proceedings has skyrocketed under Mr. Corbyn, yet last summer he resisted formalizing an internationally accepted definition of anti-Semitism in party rules. The willingness of the rebels to leave raises questions about why so many others are still working for Mr. Corbyn.

As for Brexit, this is the latest evidence that Britain’s impending departure from the European Union is scrambling domestic politics. Both major parties remain deeply divided on Brexit and the bigger question of what the British economy should be after it leaves. Theresa May’s Conservatives are split between free-market Brexiteers and Remainers who are woolier on economics.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The FBI’s Trump Panic McCabe reveals how officials contemplated a bureaucratic coup.

By on February 18th, 2019

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-fbis-trump-panic-11550508578

The American people have largely taken the disruptive Trump Presidency in stride, going about their lives and expressing their approval or not the constitutional way—at the ballot box. The same can’t be said for many of the country’s panicked elites, as we are learning anew about the Federal Bureau of Investigation as former deputy director Andrew McCabe hawks a new memoir.

Mr. McCabe now says that, after Mr. Trump fired FBI director Jim Comey in May 2017, Mr. McCabe and senior Justice Department officials “discussed whether the vice president and a majority of the Cabinet could be brought together to remove the President of the United States under the 25th Amendment.” That’s according to Scott Pelley’s account of his interview with Mr. McCabe aired Sunday on CBS’s “60 Minutes.”

In the interview, Mr. McCabe says Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein raised the 25th Amendment scenario “and discussed it with me in the context of thinking about how many other cabinet officials might support such an effort.” Mr. McCabe says he didn’t contribute much but seems to excuse the conversation because “it was an unbelievably stressful time.”

Mr. McCabe was fired last year for lying to FBI investigators, so it’s hard to know how much to believe. He’s also tried to qualify the interview after excerpts were disclosed, with a spokesperson saying that while Mr. McCabe “participated in a discussion that included a comment by Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein regarding the 25th Amendment,” he did not participate in any “extended discussions” about removing Mr. Trump.

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ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Debunking Qanta Ahmed’s Corrosive Claim, ‘Antisemitism Is Profoundly Against Islam’ By Andrew G. Bostom

By on February 18th, 2019

https://pjmedia.com/homeland-security/debunking-qanta-ahmeds-corrosive-claim-antisemitism-is-profoundly-against-islam/

“Until Qanta Ahmed musters the intellectual and moral courage to similarly connect the modern scourge of Islamic Jew-hatred to Islam itself, she and her obfuscating misrepresentations will continue to do more harm than good.”

Qanta Ahmed is a secular Pakistani Muslim physician, and occasional talking head, who fancies herself “a Muslim expert in Islamism.” As I have demonstrated previously, she in fact has a very thin veneer of understanding of Islam, and an apparent willingness to engage in takiya, sanctioned Islamic dissimulation.

Appearing Saturday evening with Judge Jeanine Pirro, Ahmed elaborated on an op-ed she had published in The Daily Caller on February 14 that claimed:

Congresswoman Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), an American Muslim of Somali origin, shames American Muslims with the antisemitism she has brought to Congress.

Notwithstanding this rather dubious assertion of “shame,” given the global pandemic of Muslim Jew-hatred, which now includes Muslim diaspora populations in the West, Ahmed had the following exchange (from 35:14-35-37) with Judge Pirro. Ahmed observed, appropriately, “Empowering antisemitism is against every American value,” which elicited a quick interjection from Judge Pirro, “And against our Judeo-Christian ethics,” prompting Ahmed to aver, “And it is also against Islam, which reveres the Torah and Judaism.” This latter, patently false statement by Ahmed, in turn, prompted Judge Pirro to add the requisite cultural relativist fig leaf caveat, “And you and I understand when you say, ‘Islamist’ there is a political ideology, versus the Muslim religion,” because Ahmed had earlier (32:07-17) accused Muslim Congresswoman Ilhan Omar of “ringing completely true with Islamist antisemitism”—as if this artificial construct was completely divorced from Islam’s intrinsic Jew-hatred. Nodding approvingly, Ahmed quickly chimed in, “Exactly,” and the segment ended.

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