RUTHFULLY YOURS

Something’s rotten in the fairy-tale kingdom of progress. It is crumbling like the magical land of Fantastica after people stopped believing in it. Progs are melting like toons under the green shower of Judge Doom. Is our never-ending narrative finished? Comrade Red Square investigates.

Comrades!

170 years ago, Karl Marx began his Communist Manifesto by writing, “A specter is haunting Europe – the specter of communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this specter.”

Marxism has since been upgraded with many new features and functions. The revolutionary class is no longer the workers, but the white-color coalition of identity pressure groups, spearheaded by transsexuals and financed by international currency manipulators. Imperialism and colonialism were replaced with globalism and mass migration. The violent revolution was replaced with the march through the institutions, class struggle with culture wars, and historical materialism with phallophobia.

Even the specter of communism has been replaced. As karmic retribution for Karl Marx’s known penchant to sexually harass his female subordinates, the world is now being haunted by the specter of Pussy™, with all the progressive powers entering into a holy alliance to enable this haunting and protect it from exorcism, even as it’s fixing to swallow the entire progressive movement, chew it up, and spit out the bones.

The haunting began on Friday, Oct. 7, 2016, when we released an 11-year-old Access Hollywood tape, in which the merry bachelor Trump was recorded bragging about his status as a celebrity, which was why beautiful women in the industry allowed him to kiss them and “grab them by the pussy.” Designed to destroy Trump, this October surprise barely made a dent. We followed it up with a massive media campaign, in which the P-word was memefied in thousands of images, but the nation’s psyche remained unscathed. We organized million-strong marches of pussycomrades in pussyhats, but the country treated them as clowns.

Nothing in our playbook was working; we should’ve just stopped. But when a prog hits a wall, the answer is always to push harder. We became possessed by the P-specter. It made us fixated on P-issues, repeating the P-word like a magic spell and howling it at the moon as we channeled our rage toward white cisgendered hetero-males who we imagined were all guilty of P-grabbing. In the process we became impossible zero-tolerance prudes. If Marx were still around, we’d have called him a creep, pressured him to resign, and mocked his theories on late night shows. Our sexual revolution became a Freudian slip-and-fall mess. We began to purge everyone who didn’t live up to the new puritanical standard, even if it meant losing valuable comrades.

It wasn’t always like that.

Two Trump-hating FBI gumshoes investigating Hillary Clinton’s email treachery and alleged Russian interference in last year’s election traded crude, caustic barbs about President Trump while they plotted to undermine him, congressional overseers heard yesterday.

This shouldn’t be all that surprising given that Barack Obama gleefully weaponized the FBI, Department of Justice, and various intelligence agencies, and criminalized political differences in the process. A radical zealot with a desire to fundamentally transform the United States, the 44th president had a limited sense of boundaries. Obama was more Third World caudillo than president and he was never troubled by hijacking governmental powers to hurt his opposition, as the conservative groups targeted by his IRS can attest. His race-obsessed first attorney general, Eric Holder, turned the Justice Department into a virtual arm of the Democratic Party, using the agency to punish the Left’s enemies and let allies run wild. His second attorney general, Loretta Lynch, surreptitiously met with Bill Clinton in an airport hangar, presumably to cut a shady deal to let Hillary Clinton escape punishment for the many crimes she committed in office.

“It’s clear there was a nefarious conspiracy” between federal officials to defeat Trump, Fox News legal analyst Gregg Jarrett told Sean Hannity after the hearing. Jarrett added that when the plot didn’t succeed, the conspirators switched to Plan B, which he described as, “Let’s just say there’s a crime and then we’ll just search for a crime.”

At the House Judiciary Committee hearing Wednesday, Rod Rosenstein, the second-highest-ranking official at the Justice Department and the man who appointed Russia probe-leading Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III, gave a clean bill of health to Mueller’s ongoing witch hunt aimed at reversing last year’s election result.

“I know what he’s doing,” Rosenstein said. “He consults with me about their investigation, within and without the scope.”

The committee’s chairman, Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.), expressed alarm at the ever-expanding investigation, saying, “We are now beginning to understand the magnitude of this insider bias on Mueller’s team.” As previously reported, there were nine Democrat donors on the team of 15, and one member had even worked for Hillary Clinton.

To be honest, I regret that Mr Moore will not be going to Washington. I have a high degree of tolerance for people whose lines are almost as good as the concoctions of professional satirists, and the Moores kept that up until the end. I don’t mean just Roy’s varying answers in his train-wreck interview with Sean Hannity on whether he’d dated teenage girls (“not generally”, and then, not “without the permission of her mother”). But I’m also thinking of Mrs Moore’s eve-of-poll rejection of charges that she and her husband “don’t care for Jews”:

Well, one of our attorneys is a Jew.

I was reminded of my late comrade Mordecai Richler’s novel St Urbain’s Horseman, wherein a Union Nationale junior minister is dispatched to refute accusations that Quebec’s government is similarly anti-semitic:

Speaking for myself, my accountant is a Jew and I always buy my cars from Sonny Fish.

In fact, I’m not sure Kayla Moore’s line isn’t funnier: I think “attorney” is droller in its implications than “accountant”, and “one of our” is the capper.

Presumably, the reason they need all those attorneys is all these statements from Seventies nymphettes that Roy was lurking in the back booth of the malt shop eying them up for most of his early middle age. America has statutes of limitations for a reason – because the accuracy of accusation diminishes considerably with the passage of time. Speaking for myself, as that Quebec minister would say, I prefer worldly courtesans d’un certain âge to giggling jailbait, and regard the most pitiful passage in the Starr Report to be the moment when Monica Lewinsky demands to know of the President of the United States whether he loves the new Sarah McLachlan album as much as she does. Could have been worse, I suppose. Could have been Hootie and the Blowfish. But, at any rate, Moore’s preferences as an eligible bachelor for the youngish end of Alabammy maidenhood doesn’t make him the Jimmy Savile of Dixie.

Back then, there were lots of 32-year-old men chasing 19-year-old girls – the Prince of Wales and Lady Diana Spencer, to cite only the most obvious example. It was a common plot in big worldwide hits: When the Oscar-winning Best Picture An American in Paris was shot, Leslie Caron was 19, and Gene Kelly was pushing 40; when the original Broadway production of My Fair Lady opened, Julie Andrews was 19, and Rex Harrison was pushing 50. You can’t find a single contemporary review of either that so much as notices the age difference. My old friend Alan Jay Lerner authored both scripts and won Oscars and Tonys respectively, and, as a practical matter, it was the only plot he knew how to write: My Fair Lady (1956) – older, sophisticated, mature bachelor takes young unformed girl in hand and moulds her; Gigi (1958) – older, sophisticated, mature bachelor takes young unformed girl, etc, etc; Lolita, My Love (1971) – older, sophisticated mature, etc, etc, etc …ah, but that was one reprise too many of “Thank Heaven for Little Girls”.

WASHINGTON – Former Democratic National Committee Interim Chairwoman Donna Brazile said the DNC paid a great deal of money to make a “replica” of all of the information on their server and computers after the hacking was discovered last year and then “destroyed the machines.”

During a discussion about her new book, Hacks: The Inside Story of the Break-ins and Breakdowns That Put Donald Trump in the White House, Brazile was asked why the DNC did not immediately allow the FBI to examine its server after the hacking took place during the 2016 presidential campaign. Several cybersecurity firms, including CrowdStrike, attributed the hack to Russia.

“The first time I heard about the quote-unquote hacking, it was in June I heard about it. My machines had already started to have some really interesting – I had a DNC phone and a DNC computer and DNC email because as I mentioned I did a lot of stuff in the voting-rights field and [asked staff] ‘what’s going on?’” Brazile said during the event at the National Press Club on Tuesday evening. A staffer told her “‘we’re told to turn in all of our systems,’ so everyone turned in everything.”

The DNC hired CrowdStrike. “The person we hired was the former No. 3 at the FBI, and they worked it out. They got a list from the FBI of things the FBI wanted, and in that list of items that the FBI requested they asked for a replica or an exact copy of everything we had from our server, knowing that if we got rid of our server we actually would get rid of our entire database, our brain would gone and then essentially we would have nothing,” she added.

Brazile said the total duplication and remediation process after the hacking cost the DNC “millions” of dollars.

“We made a replica of everything and turned it all over to [the FBI]. We also let them see all of the evidence from all of the individual computers, from everything else. So we, trust me, it cost us quite a penny to make replicas and then we destroyed the machines and then bought the staff people new laptops,” she said. “If you can imagine this, right before the convention, these staffers had lost all of their data, all of their materials – everything was gone. Everything was wiped clean, but we made a replica.”

Brazile recalled the DNC having to decide whether to “shut down” or “kill” the server after the hack took place.

“We kept getting more spyware. They were so stealth. The operation was so stealth,” she said.

Brazile mentioned that former FBI Director James Comey had said during one of his congressional testimonies that the DNC did not cooperate with the FBI in terms of access to its server. CONTINUE AT SITE

Within 10 days of taking office, President Trump issued Executive Order 13771, which directs agencies to reduce regulatory burdens by eliminating two existing regulations for each new one issued. This announcement was met with a healthy dose of skepticism, as the steady expansion of the regulatory state traditionally has been a bipartisan affair. No longer.

This week, the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs released a status report on agencies’ progress on regulations. In only its first 10 months, the Trump administration has far exceeded its promise to eliminate two existing regulations for each new one—an unprecedented advance against the regulatory state.

By comparison, in his final eight months, President Obama saddled the economy with as much as $15.2 billion in regulatory costs, while hiding from the public a needlessly “secret” list of more than 600 regulations. Reversing this trend sends a clear message to families and businesses: It’s OK to plan for the future without the looming threat of red tape.

On Thursday OIRA will publish the administration’s first Regulatory Plan and Agenda, which covers all federal agencies for fiscal year 2018. The plan calls for the administration to drive already substantial reductions in regulatory costs even further. This is a fundamental shift from the policies of the past.

Some regulations legitimately address important health, safety and welfare priorities identified by Congress. The Trump administration respects the rule of law and will not roll back effective, legally required regulations. But in the previous administration, agencies frequently exceeded their legal authority when imposing costly rules. Some agencies announced important policy changes without following the formal rule-making process.

Agencies are now expected to regulate only when explicitly authorized by law—and to follow the proper procedures. The same standards now apply to regulatory and deregulatory actions. If the government exercises its regulatory power, it should do so with fair notice and due process, and only upon a conclusion that the regulation is necessary and that the benefits of the regulation justify its costs.

Regulatory reform not only promotes individual liberty and a flourishing economy, it also supports constitutional democracy. Through OIRA’s regulatory review process, we ensure that agencies stay within the legal authority given by Congress. When the law provides discretion, we work with agencies to ensure that regulatory policy reflects presidential priorities. This executive direction makes the rule-making process democratic and accountable. CONTINUE AT SITE

Democrats and the media are accusing anyone who criticizes special counsel Robert Mueller as Trumpian conspirators trying to undermine his probe. But who needs critics when Mr. Mueller’s team is doing so much to undermine its own credibility?

Wednesday’s revelations—they’re coming almost daily—include the Justice Department’s release of 2016 text messages to and from Peter Strzok, the FBI counterintelligence agent whom Mr. Mueller demoted this summer. The texts, which he exchanged with senior FBI lawyer Lisa Page, contain expletive-laced tirades against Mr. Trump. Such Trump hatred is no surprise and not by itself disqualifying. More troubling are texts that suggest that some FBI officials may have gone beyond antipathy to anti-Trump plotting.

“I want to believe the path you threw out for consideration in Andy’s office—that there’s no way [Trump] gets elected—but I’m afraid we can’t take that risk,” Mr. Strzok wrote Ms. Page in an Aug. 15, 2016 text. He added: “It’s like an insurance policy in the unlikely event you die before you’re 40.”

What “policy” would that be? The “Andy” in question is Andrew McCabe, the deputy FBI director. FBI officials are allowed to have political opinions, but what kind of action were they discussing that would amount to anti-Trump “insurance”?

In another exchange that month, Ms. Page forwarded a Trump-related article and wrote: “Maybe you’re meant to stay where you are because you’re meant to protect the country from that menace.” He thanked her and assured: “Of course I’ll try and approach it that way.” Mr. Strzok, recall, is the man who changed the words “grossly negligent” to “extremely careless” in James Comey’s July 2016 public exoneration of Hillary Clinton’s emails.

There was a rush to judgment last week on Peter Strzok, a top FBI counterintelligence agent and one of the lead agents on the Hillary Clinton emails investigation, after revelations that Strzok exchanged text messages during the 2016 campaign with an FBI lawyer that were pro-Clinton and anti-Trump. The lawyer was Lisa Page, with whom he was having an extramarital affair.

Like Strzok, Page worked on both the Clinton probe and on special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of possible Trump campaign collusion with Russia.

In light of the obvious appearance of bias, Mueller rightly removed Strzok from the Trump-Russia case. (Page had already left the investigation.) Nevertheless, Strzok and the Mueller investigation were slammed as Clintonian pillars of anti-Trump animus. Not only were there calls for a purge of possibly corrupt bureaucrats in the FBI and Justice Department, but one Fox News host asserted that these government lawyers and agents should be “taken out in handcuffs” and “locked up.”

Interesting thing: Mueller recently took a guilty plea from Michael Flynn, fleetingly President Trump’s national security adviser, for lying in an FBI interview. News that the interview was conducted by Strzok added fuel to the bias fire.

Yet, as the Wall Street Journal reported last week, former FBI Director James Comey told the House Intelligence Committee in closed session last March that the agents who interviewed Flynn believed he had been truthful. Far from railroading Flynn (and, derivatively, Trump), it appears that Strzok and Comey’s FBI did not seek his prosecution. That decision was made months later, by Mueller’s investigators. It was based on additional investigation, which is hard to depict as skewed since Flynn, after all, has admitted his guilt.

There is significant reason to be concerned about investigative bias.

In a serendipitous bit of typesetting, two opposing views of human nature are posted in Saturday’s Times. On the op-ed page are Gail Collins and Greg Weiner, each propounding the justice of forcing Al Franken to resign; the former stressing his refusal to accept total responsibility for his vaguely remembered misdeeds, the latter insisting that a statesman’s character is paramount in his calling and his role is to “refine and enlarge,” not simply reflect the public’s views (Federalist 10 NYT op-ed 12/9/17) Then, on the back page is an article about Judge Jack Weinstein calling for more alternatives in sentencing violent offenders facing prison.

The Al Franken lynch-mob sees his non-violent transgressions as rendering him unfit for his elected office and have no pangs of conscience on drastically affecting his career and life. The judge is worried about violent men “who have been trapped in a gang culture, and condemned to a life of poverty and probable crime.” The particular young men in this case broke into a family’s apartment where five children under ten witnessed the gun wielders terrify and rob the victims. Collins and Weiner have no truck with mercy for Franken, a comedian at the time he committed the heinous act of posing for a picture that simulated groping a sleeping woman. The judge has so much mercy that he surely short-changes those law-abiding men of East New York who have sufficient character and determinatiion to graduate from school, get jobs and avoid lives of crime. The giveaway is his viewing the criminals as “condemned” to their lifestyle, as opposed to having opted for it as a quicker more lucrative path than the daily drudge of school and work.

Kristen Gillibrand, our New York senator who got the job largely through monetary and political help of both Clintons, had this to say about the current epidemic of cleansing society of abusive males: “I think when we start having to talk about the differences between sexual assault and sexual harassment and unwanted groping you are having the wrong conversation. You need to draw a line in the sand and say none of it is ok.” (Capitol News Conference) What would Judge Weinstein say to this type of non-differential thinking if the senator were representing one of the criminals in his courtroom? Is an unwanted grope really no different than a rape? And if we condemn those who are tried in the court of public opinion for deeds committed years and decades ago, why not ask Ms. Gillibrand to resign for having accepted the favors of a man who committed perjury and didn’t need to search his memory. All of us could see the truth as plainly as that finger wagging across our tv screens protesting that he “had not had sex with that woman” – the one whose dress was stained with DNA from an appendage that yielded far more credible evidence than that lying finger.

Democrats and feminists who supported Bill then, now have to decide whether it’s better to admit to being hypocrites or stick with being too dense to make distinctions between sexual harassment and sexual assault. They also must ask themselves how their movement has failed to give its constituency the necessary gumption to stand up for themselves in the workplace. Rules about sexual harassment have been in place since Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and many women have availed themselves of this recourse. After all the talk of giving women a voice, are we really willing to settle for applauding women who, years after the fact, slink into the groupthink hashtagmetoo? What can we say about the women who preferred saying nothing and collecting large sums of money for their silence? At the same time that we accept the stories women tell without the need for independent corroboration, we are encouraging a stampede of indiscriminate firings that give the lie to the notion of due process. Senator McCarthy had more to go on than the senators who just killed Al Franken with an act of meaningless hypocrisy. Al would have had a better shot in Judge Weinstein’s criminal court than with the esteemed jury of his senatorial peers.

The Alabama Senate election was about everything except Alabama. And in the end, Alabamans stayed home and let the inevitable turnout tide of passion politics take its course. Minority voters rallied to Obama. Republicans stayed home. And the GOP is now holding on to a bare one-seat Senate majority.

The Democrats had abandoned Alabama, along with much of the South. They weren’t interested in Doug Jones until they smelled weakness. And they still aren’t interested in representing Alabamans now. They just want another Senate seat to bring them closer to blocking and impeaching President Trump.

Alabama isn’t a place to them. It’s another chess piece in a Washington D.C. game that they can use to block judicial nominations, shut down the government and reverse the results of the previous election. They have Alabama now, but history suggests that unless they learn the lessons that cost them their former strongholds in the South, they won’t hold on to the seat that they paid a very pretty penny for.

The Alabama River follows a long and meandering course. But not nearly as long and meandering as the dark river of money that poured into the Alabama Senate race.

The tide of cash swirled, eddied and drifted along the secret rivers that flowed from Washington D.C. and San Francisco, from Las Vegas and New York City, and decided an election. Timed spending meant that they could avoid revealing their donors. And the biggest spender in the race had no money.

Some of these rivers had strange names.

There was Highway 31.The real Highway 31 links Alabama to Michigan. But the Highway 31 SuperPAC was a money route worth over $4 million leading back to Washington D.C. and New York City. Behind the local name were Senate Schumer’s Senate Majority PAC and the Obama/Hillary Priorities USA Action which was best known for a slimy ad accusing Mitt Romney of killing a steelworker’s wife.

Soros money may have poured down Highway 31 as the secretive shell group became the biggest outside spender in the race. Even though officially its bank account was empty. Instead consulting firms run by Obama staffers did the work on credit for Highway 31. That meant Highway 31 didn’t have to reveal its donors until after the election. Meanwhile Highway 31 ran an ad warning Alabama voters that their votes in the election were a matter of “public record” and that their “community will know.”

Coming up behind Highway 31 was Stand Up Republic. Like Highway 31, Stand Up Republic is a folksy false front. Behind the name that could easily belong to a jeans company or a chain of comedy club is Evan McMullin, a former CIA agent, Wall Streeter and independent 2016 presidential candidate.

Stand Up Republic claims to be fighting for “democratic norms”. McMullin claims to be a Never Trumper conservative. Neither claim holds up very well considering that the only known donor to SUR is Persian billionaire Pierre Omidyar who provided $250,000 to McMullin’s group. The Franco-Persian tycoon is best known for funding The Intercept, a radical left-wing site that specializes in undermining national security and which will be forever linked to the Snowden spy case.

McMullin has claimed that, “Donald Trump is not a loyal American and we should prepare for the next four years accordingly.” His own loyalties appear to be rather complicated. Omidyar’s SUR grant is listed alongside grants like Veterans Against Islamaphophia and Strategies for American Muslim Communities.

Out of these murky waters came $500K in ads.