NO, IT WAS DRIVEN BY HATRED FOR ALL THINGS REPUBLICAN: Was Mueller probe driven by political bias against Trump?
Archive for 2019
April 18, 2019
OUR SOURCE WAS THE NEW YORK TIMES: ‘Nefarious!’ NYT’s Maggie Haberman finds definitive proof that the Trump White House is infested with Nazis.
WHOA: Prosecutors Ask To Present Evidence That NXIVM Sex Cult Leaders Illegally Bundled Money For Hillary Clinton Campaign. “Prosecutors have asked to present evidence in the NXIVM sex cult racketeering trial showing that NXIVM leaders including Nancy Salzman and Clare Bronfman illegally bundled money for Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign by compelling members to donate to Clinton and then reimbursing the members.”
Developing…
SPIN, SPIN, SPIN: ‘Propaganda,’ ‘a Farce,’ and ‘a Disgrace’: 2020 Dems Slam AG Barr’s Press Conference.
I’m so old I can remember when we were told we must accept the results of the Mueller investigation.
HERE’S A SEARCHABLE PDF OF THE MUELLER REPORT.
IN THE MAIL: From Bret Easton Ellis, White.
JIM TREACHER: Seattle Man Punches Priest After Asking, ‘How’s Trump?’ “Now that CBS is normalizing political violence, it’s open season on anybody the left doesn’t like. It’s okay to punch Nazis, and a Nazi can be anybody you want. Even a priest.”
WELL, THAT’S PRETTY CLEAR: No Collusion, No Obstruction, AG Barr Confirms in Press Conference. “‘The investigation did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government and its election interference activities,’ Barr quoted from the Mueller report.”
PLUS: Andy McCarthy on Fox just now: “The special counsel did not resolve the prosecutorial decision on obstruction, so this is a decision for Barr to make.”
Anything else is just spin, spin, spin.
FROM LESLIE EASTMAN AT LEGAL INSURRECTION, A REVIEW of Megan Fox’s new book, Believe Evidence: The Death of Due Process from Salome to #MeToo.
JAMES P. PINKERTON: The Democrats’ Coming Sister Souljah Moment. “Sooner or later, they’ll need to distance themselves from the radicalism of Ilhan Omar.”
Given the current Corbynization of the party, is that still a possibility? Bill Clinton — he of the famous Sister Souljah moment — is too centrist for today’s Democrats.
STANDING UP TO THE CRYBULLIES: George Mason law school senior associate dean: Justice Kavanaugh will not be fired despite demands.
ANTISOCIAL MEDIA: Twitter blocks EFF tweet that criticized bogus takedown of a previous tweet. “Starz filed bogus takedown requests—Twitter eventually restored blocked tweets.”
WHY ARE LEFTIES SO RACIST? Socialist students: Don’t let ‘war criminal’ Condoleezza Rice speak.
YOU SHOULD BE ABLE TO WATCH THE BARR PRESS CONFERENCE LIVE HERE.
UPDATE: Bob Barr is the adult in the room here, explaining why there’s nothing there with no collusion and no obstruction and unprecedented cooperation from the White House, including a White House decision not to exert executive privilege even though the President would have been well within his rights to do so. Expect the press to ignore that as much as possible in favor of the usual Schiff.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Here’s the transcript.
MORE: Seen on Facebook:
I loved Barr’s response to some reporterette who asked why he called President Trump’s situation at the beginning of his presidency, with him, his family, and associates under intense scrutiny and investigation “unprecedented.”
Reporter: “Why do you say that is unprecedented?”
Barr: “Has it happened before?”
Reporter: “No.”
Barr: “Then it’s unprecedented.”
Heh.
LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Special Mueller Report Edition and Much, Much More. “All the major media outlets have ‘guides’ about how to read/what it means/what you need to know about the Mueller Report. You don’t need to read anything those clowns have prepared because they don’t know what the [redacted] they are talking about.”
Solid advice.
UPDATE (FROM GLENN): In the coming weeks, I think the big story will be the investigation into how we got here, and the political weaponization of the intelligence and criminal-justice against Trump under the Obama Administration.
SPENGLER: ‘Reservoir Dems’ Prepare for a Trump 2020 Landslide. “Let’s see if I did my intersectional sums correctly: Feminists like Pelosi are Islamophobes, gays like Buttigieg are racists, blacks are homophobic, and white men like Biden and Sanders are misogynist and classist, as the case may be. Beto O’Rourke is a misogynist, although his ode to cows may win him the bovine vote. I suppose the Democrats will have to nominate Cory Booker, who says he isn’t gay but might be, and whose net worth might be as low as $600,000. No goofier notion ever invaded American political thinking than the idea of a coalition based on entitled victimhood and invented identity.”
Plus: “The great debate in antiquity on the character of a republic opposed Cicero to St. Augustine. Cicero argued that a republic was founded on common interest, to which Augustine replied that it depended on a common love. The Reservoir Democrats are united by hatred of a third party, namely the American republic itself, as well as hatred of each other and often of themselves.”
Related: Ilhan Omar, Harbinger of Democratic Decline? With political power comes rhetorical responsibility.
SOCIALIST STARVATION IN VENEZUELA: Socialist dictator Nicolas Maduro and his government ought to resign in shame, but caudillos and their cronies inevitably attempt to cling to power, no matter the suffering they inflict.
RELATED: China’s Venezuela venture.
LIGHTNING DOWN UNDER: An F-35 makes a pass over the Melbourne Air and Space Show.
SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL:
I almost feel sorry for the TV news people. They have to put on a show, but they’ll have to talk about the report without reading it. It’s 400 pages. What can they do except roll out some pre-written material?
William Barr is doing a press conference on the report at 9:30, and the report won’t be available until 11. That pretty much forces everyone to give immense priority to Barr’s presentation, and not just for the 1 1/2 hours between 9:30 and 11. They’ll have to keep talking about that, because they’ll only be getting started reading the material.
What can they do, once 11 rolls around, to avoid continuing to analyze the Barr presentation (which will include denouncing his decision to do a press conference and dominate the news in advance of the release of the text)? You can be cynical and say the text won’t affect the media, and everyone will keep saying what they were already saying, and that is, in fact, my baseline assumption. The TV news is awful.
Plus some suggestions on how to not be awful, suggestions that will almost certainly be ignored.
GOOD QUESTION: Will Tocqueville’s Dilemma Crash America?
Tocqueville insisted that old regime aristocrats felt compelled by laws and customs to take some care of their servants, that they were bound, however distantly, to their peasants by the land they shared and their regular interactions. The new industrial oligarchs would find themselves free of even these weak bonds. Tocqueville was not arguing for a return to feudalism; he was trying to show just how bad the new oligarchs would be. Workers and masters would see one another only at the factory and otherwise have no point of contact and certainly no sense of responsibility. “The manufacturing aristocracy of our day,” remarked Tocqueville, “after having impoverished and brutalized the men whom it uses, leaves them to be nourished by public charity in times of crisis. This results naturally from what precedes. Between worker and master relations are frequent, but there is no genuine association.”
Perhaps the state, by reducing material insecurity and regulating industry, could offer a partial escape from the logic of Tocqueville’s argument. But it would not fully counter the dynamic that concerned him unless it also somehow brought into existence the “genuine association” that he thought was necessary for true freedom. The more pessimistic second volume of Democracy in America presses us to worry, however, that a state powerful and centralized enough to effectively regulate the industrial economy would also, by virtue of its power and centralization, crowd out the local politics most conducive to the arts of association.
Federalism was the Founders’ attempt to balance local politics with a national government, but progressivism tipped the balance far in Washington’s favor, and seeks to tip it even further.
Still, an interesting piece and worth your time.