NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Deep State on the Defensive James Clapper and complicit media push the narrative that FBI spying on Trump was a “good thing.” Lloyd Billingsley

Posted By on May 24th, 2018

When candidate Donald Trump claimed his 2016 campaign had been the target of a spying campaign, the old-line establishment media reacted with derision. Since Trump’s 2016 victory, it has become more apparent that the spying was real, and part of an intelligence operation to exonerate Trump’s opponent Hillary Clinton, frame the victorious president on fake charges of colluding with Russia, and ultimately drive him from office.

A key player for the previous administration is former Director of National Intelligence (DNI) James Clapper, who now holds forth on MSNBC. On Tuesday, Joy Behar asked Clapper if the FBI had been spying on the Trump campaign.

“No, they were not,” said Clapper, DNI from 2010-2017. “They were spying on, a term I don’t particularly like, but on what the Russians were doing. Trying to understand were the Russians infiltrating, trying to gain access, trying to gain leverage or influence — which is what they do.”

Clapper also said, “With the informant business, well, the point here is the Russians. Not spying on the campaign but what are the Russians doing? And in a sense, unfortunately, what they were trying to do is protect our political system and protect the campaign.”

“Well,” Behar wondered, “why doesn’t he like that? He should be happy.”

Clapper agreed that “he should be,” but the president didn’t think so.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Naked is the Best Disguise: the Bipartisan Deep State By Michael Walsh

Posted By on May 24th, 2018

One of the mysteries of the deep state is just how deep it is. Like the Kryptos sculpture in the courtyard of the Central Intelligence Agency, it has proven remarkably resistant to decoding since its emergence in the aftermath of World War II, after the creation of the CIA. It is, in a very real sense, its own cipher, hiding in plain sight all along and just daring the civilians to call it by its name: the Permanent Bipartisan Fusion Party.

As it happens, the leaders of the PBFP sat for a group portrait the other day. The occasion was the funeral of former First Lady Barbara Bush, wife of George Herbert Walker “Poppy” Bush and mother of George Walker Bush, American presidents 41 and 43, respectively. Also in the photograph was the man who beat Poppy, William Jefferson Blythe III, more commonly known as Bill Clinton; and Barack Hussein Obama II, also known as Barry Soetoro, the man who succeeded George W. Bush. And their wives, of course, including Hillary Rodham Clinton, former senator from New York, former secretary of state in the Obama Administration, and the defeated candidate in the 2016 presidential election.

But the man who defeated Hillary—Donald J. Trump, the 45th president of the United States—was nowhere to be seen. The Bush family, which bears him no love after his demolition of heir-apparent Jeb in the 2016 Republican primaries, had made it clear that Trump would not be welcome in Houston. And so the Trump family was represented by First Lady Melania, while the president stayed behind in Washington under the fig leaf of protocol (presidents don’t normally attend first ladies’ funerals) and not wishing to “disrupt” the event.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

U.S. Has Leverage in Dealings with Iran and North Korea By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on May 24th, 2018

There has been a lot of misinformation about both getting out of the so-called Iran deal and getting into a new North Korean agreement. The two situations may be connected, but not in the way we are usually told.

Getting out of the Iran deal did not destroy trust in the U.S. government. Our departure from the deal does not mean that North Korea cannot reliably negotiate with America.

In 2015, the Iran deal was not approved as either a Senate-ratified treaty or a joint congressional resolution. Had the deal been a treaty, President Donald Trump could not have walked away from it so easily and with so little downside.

Former President Obama knew that he did not have majority congressional support for his initiative. Therefore, he desperately sought ways to circumvent the constitutionally directed authority of the Senate and redefine a treaty as a mere executive order

Obama got the deal approved by the Iranians in part by paying them ransom for hostages through huge nighttime cash transfers.

A cynical North Korea knew only too well that in the past, President Obama either entered into agreements or avoided them based on his therapeutic notion that human nature was both changeable and essentially noble.

The North Koreans now seem worried that a more unpredictable Trump has a quite different, pessimistic and tragic view that humans are predictably capable of almost anything—if not strongly deterred.

After Trump’s rejection of the Iran deal, North Korea now concedes that it cannot cajole a flawed agreement with the current U.S. president, who is mercurial rather than scripted in his reactions.

BOOKS Comments turned off

Philip Roth, Yesterday’s Young American By Kyle Smith

Posted By on May 24th, 2018

His later novels may be his most enduring, but future readers may shun even those, because of what they understand about who he was.

The reputations of novels and novelists wax and wane over time. Herman Melville died impecunious, and Moby-Dick didn’t begin to rise to the head of the canon until 30 years after he died. The Great Gatsby was not a great success until after F. Scott Fitzgerald died. Zora Neale Hurston died in obscurity in 1960, was rediscovered in the 1980s, and is now so revered that this spring’s publication of an 87-year-old Hurston manuscript was a literary event, and the book Barracoon today sits at number 2 on the New York Times bestseller list.

On the other hand, Norman Mailer was once the most famous novelist in America. As recently as 1991, publication of one of his books (Harlot’s Ghost) was major cultural news. His books sold hugely. His mantel groaned with the tonnage of his awards. He was a fixture on talk shows. No one who cared about books could fail to have an informed opinion about him, but even people who didn’t read books knew who he was. Today, if you stopped by the English department of an elite university and talked to the undergraduates, you’d have a hard time finding anyone who cares about Norman Mailer, just a decade after his death. Certainly you’d find students who have never heard of him. Norman Mailer is no longer important.

A similar fate may await Philip Roth. Before his death on Tuesday he was widely seen as America’s greatest living novelist. But will he be widely read in 30 years’ time, or even 20? I doubt it, although he may be saved by works that are among his least characteristic efforts.

Departed artists get subjected to a harsh, often unfair reductionism, and in Roth’s case a prodigious output — more than 30 books — will be collapsed into an unflattering assessment passed on from professors to curious undergraduates to less curious undergraduates. Roth, like many of his protagonists, will be described as a striver from the urban immigrant ghettos of the 1940s with a Holocaust-informed persecution complex and a ferocious, rageful lust. Roth, like Mailer, grew up in a culture that struck him as a prison of sexual convention and repression. Much of his writerly energy went into a frenzied, wailing hammering against those walls.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

How the Clinton-Emails Investigation Intertwined with the Russia Probe By Andrew C. McCarthy

Posted By on May 24th, 2018

Obama administration officials in the DOJ and FBI saw the cases as inseparably linked.

‘Cruz just dropped out of the race. It’s going to be a Clinton Trump race. Unbelievable.”

It was a little after midnight on May 4, 2016. FBI lawyer Lisa Page was texting her paramour, FBI counterespionage agent Peter Strzok, about the most stunning development to date in the 2016 campaign: Donald Trump was now the inevitable Republican nominee. He would square off against Hillary Clinton, the Democrats’ certain standard-bearer.

The race was set . . . between two major-party candidates who were both under investigation by the FBI.

In stunned response, Strzok wrote what may be the only words we need to know, the words that reflected the mindset of his agency’s leadership and of the Obama administration: “Now the pressure really starts to finish MYE.”

MYE. That’s Mid-Year Exam, the code-word the FBI had given to the Hillary Clinton emails probe.

“It sure does,” responded Page. Mind you, she was not just any FBI lawyer; she was counsel and confidant to the bureau’s No. 2 official, Deputy Director Andrew McCabe.

If the thousands of text messages between Ms. Page and Agent Strzok are clear on anything, they are clear on the thinking of the bureau’s top brass.

In its Trump antipathy, the media-Democrat complex has admonished us to ignore the Strzok-Page texts. FBI officials are as entitled as anyone else to their political opinions, we’re told; and if they found Trump loathsome, they were no different from half the country.

That’s the wrong way to look at it. Regardless of their politics (which, the texts show, are not as left-wing as some conservative-media hyperbole claims), these FBI officials are a window into how the Obama administration regarded the two investigations in which Strzok and Page were central players: Mid Year Exam and Trump-Russia — the latter eventually code-named “Crossfire Hurricane.”

The two investigations must not be compartmentalized. Manifestly, the FBI saw them as inseparably linked: Trump’s victory in the primaries, the opening of his path to the Oval Office, meant — first and foremost — that the Hillary investigation had to be brought to a close.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Left Waits for Godot—Er, Mueller ‘Resistance’ types crave impeachment desperately, but can’t be bothered to do much of anything about it. By Ted Rall

Posted By on May 24th, 2018

Mr. Rall is a political cartoonist and author of “Francis: The People’s Pope,” the latest in a series of graphic-novel biographies.

On book tour in Ohio a few weeks ago, someone asked me if Donald Trump would finish out his term. The room was full of liberals and left-of-the-Democrats.

I pointed out that House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and other top Democrats have said that they have no interest in impeachment even if their party wins back Congress. I predicted—with the usual caveats about the perils of political prognostication—that Mr. Trump would not only finish his term but win re-election, due to the divisions within the Democratic Party.

Loud gasps all around. Some people were so peeved—at me!—that I had to remind them: “I’m not a warlock. I don’t make anything happen.”

Many Democrats are surprised Mr. Trump has hung on this long. Magical thinking is legion on the left. A recent Rasmussen poll finds that 41% of Democrats believe the president will be impeached and removed from office by 2020—more than the 36% who think the voters will reject him in 2½ years.

But how would that happen? Despite its legal-linguistic trappings—“high crimes and misdemeanors,” “counts,” “hearings,” “trial”—impeachment is a political process. This GOP president has nothing existential to fear from this GOP Congress. Should a Big Blue Wave occur, Mrs. Pelosi’s plans don’t include divisive hearings—and even if Democrats won every Senate race, they’d still be well short of the two-thirds needed to remove Mr. Trump from office.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Clapper’s desperation revealed in appearance on The View By Thomas Lifson

Posted By on May 24th, 2018

James Clapper has a brand new book to sell, which must be his excuse for forgetting Denis Healey’s First Law of Holes: “When in one, stop digging.” Yesterday, he appeared on The View and brought a metaphorical shovel with him. The entire nine-and-a-half-minute segment is embedded below, and it is worth watching if only to observe the bizarre facial expressions he manifested while tap-dancing around the truth of what he and other members of the cabal have been caught doing.

Fortunately for those in a hurry, Doug Ross put together a collage of his contortions that reveal his stress and discomfort – “[l]ooking down, looking away, grimacing, and gesticulating wildly,” in Ross’s description:

It is always possible to grab awkward faces off a video clip, but if you watch the clip below, you will see that Ross has not pulled this kind of trick. The man repeatedly grimaces and gestures in odd ways as he digs his hole deeper.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

ACT! FOR CANADA

Posted By on May 24th, 2018

https://www.actforcanada.ca/ACT! For Canada is a forum for citizens concerned about the triumphalist brand of Islam that seeks to erode our cherished western principles of free speech and equality with the goal of eventual Islamic supremacy in the West.

We are fighting to protect our Country by speaking out in defense of our democratic values, our security and our liberty against the rise of Islamism. And we’re fighting for the protection of Canada’s national security.

ACT volunteers from across the country are mobilizing to make a difference in their communities and for their nation.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Big Jim Clapper Wants You Watched Edward Cline

Posted By on May 24th, 2018

James Clapper, former head of the CIA, stated that the U.S. government’s spying on political candidates, especially ones he doesn’t approve of, was a legitimate action. A Daily Caller article, “Clapper Defends Spying On Trump Campaign as ‘A Legitimate Activity’,” by Julia Nista, on May21, quotes him:

Clapper, currently a CNN security analyst, said he is not OK with Trump ordering an investigation into the DOJ, saying, “that’s actually a very disturbing assault on the independence of the Department of Justice.”

“When this president or any president tries to use the Department of Justice as a private investigatory body, that’s not good for the country.”

Clapper said he is concerned about “politicizing what is a legitimate activity, and an important one, on the part of the FBI. They use informants and have strict rules and protocols under this.”

You have to wonder what Clapper’s notion of “politicizing” is when the DOJ was a tool of the Democrats, charged with the task of finding “dirt” on Trump during his campaign –hardly “independent”! – and after he occupied the White House.

In the meantime, the Gateway Pundit, on May 2nd, devoted some time to the belligerent utterings of another ex-CIA director, John Brennan, in Christina Laila’s “John Brennan’a Latest Cryptic Tweet Has People Asking ‘Is This a Threat to Trump?’”:

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

What undermines democracy? Douglas Murray

Posted By on May 23rd, 2018

The production of three-volume novels may have dried up, but their place has been more than adequately taken by the Netflix/Amazon Prime market. Just as readers of the past found it hard to put down a really good novel, so today it is impossible not to click the “next episode” box once an episode is over. Or binge-watch a season in a sitting.

I was recently persuaded to watch The Looming Tower, an adaptation of Lawrence Wright’s excellent 2006 book on the run-up to 9/11, having resisted because of a presumption that it would not be perfect for any down-time. Yet the series is not only well scripted and acted, but also — as with much of the best art — constantly throws light on recent events. One came from the reminder about the amount of time the world — and America in particular — spent in the 1990s talking about Monica Lewinsky.

It is easy to portray those days as halcyon in retrospect. A film adaptation of Philip Roth’s The Human Stain once made precisely that error. In fact the episode felt at the time, as it was, tawdry, demeaning and suggestive. That the nation which had saved the world from destruction three times in a century should finish its great century in such a fashion seemed at the time — as now — to be emblematic of some greater falling away.

Yet what attention and energy was expended. The makers of The Looming Tower do not over-focus on it, but the thought is placed each time a television flashes in the background with a discussion of “that dress” that if people had not been focused on other matters, worse things might have been averted.

***

It is unprovable, of course. Besides which fact, democracies — and democrat — need to be able to multitask. But in recent weeks the feeling does occur that this era might recur. Anderson Cooper’s interview with the porn star Stormy Daniels was treated like, and trailed as, one of the big political interviews of yore. Every day’s news seem similarly stuck on the gleeful pile-in onto whatever is that day’s scandal. Even those stories which should give pause — North Korea, the use of chemical weapons in Syria — swiftly degenerate into a “what did X (usually the President) say about Y on Twitter?”. One wonders what it would take to shake us out of this.