THE BIND THE CRAZY PEOPLE PUT THEMSELVES IN, AND WHY THIS WILL GET MUCH WORSE: Why Trump?
Archive for 2022
August 12, 2022
THEY ARE SOWING THE WIND: More Trump raid fallout: is there anyone on earth naive enough to believe the DOJ on this?
HE NEVER HAD ANY IMPARTIALITY: Reinhart Recused Self from Trump-Clinton Suit.
HAPPY HAPPY FAMILY: Hunter Goes On Vacation With Joe And Jill.
HE’S RIGHT. WE CAN’T ATTACK THE DOJ INTEGRITY. THEY DON’T HAVE ANY: Garland Personally Ok’d Warrant, Whines About Attacks On DOJ “Integrity”.
August 11, 2022
AN EARTH-SHATTERING KABOOM: Report: Eight explosions at Russian air base in Belarus just across the border from Ukraine.
JOHN HINDERAKER: OBSERVATIONS ON THE MAR-A-LAGO RAID. “The Democrats crossed the Rubicon when they raided Donald Trump’s home. Never before in American history has anything like this happened. I think the consensus of the commentariat is correct: the Democrats had better have something really good up their sleeve, or the blowback will be intense. Hence Merrick Garland’s sad performance today.”
My prediction: The search warrant application will be supported by vague stuff that sounds explosive, but is dubiously sourced. That’s been the pattern ever since the bogus “Russian collusion” narrative, which the FBI and DOJ shamelessly promoted even though they knew it was false.
OPEN THREAD: What’s happening?
KIMBERLY STRASSEL: The Payback for Mar-a-Lago Will Be Brutal.
Democrats may be betting that adverse coverage of Mr. Trump will help them in November, or in 2024. They’d better hope so. Their media defenders recklessly ignore the boomerang history of unleashed governmental powers and the long-term political danger of violating precedents and norms. A Democratic Congress enacted, and Jimmy Carter signed, the first independent counsel law in 1978. Two decades later it led to Bill Clinton’s impeachment.
If anything, a perceived political persecution of Mr. Trump could help him to a second term. And he would be even more unrestrained as the 47th president than he was as the 45th. A second Trump administration wouldn’t have the caliber of grown-ups who signed up for the first tour. Mr. Garland’s raid has made even the highest political figures fair prosecutorial game, and the media’s new standard is that the department can’t be questioned as it goes about ensuring “no one is above the law.” Let’s see how that holds when a future Republican Justice Department starts raiding the homes of Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Eric Holder, James Comey and John Brennan.
Payback could come even sooner. Democrats set a new low with their Ukrainian impeachment circus, and a GOP House next year might be up for a reprise. Get ready for a few more select committees—perhaps excluding the minority party, as the Democrats effectively did with the Jan. 6 committee—to investigate Mr. Garland’s politicized department or Hunter Biden’s finances. Watch them subpoena sitting Democratic representatives, as the Jan. 6 committee did to Republicans. Reps. Adam Schiff, Ilhan Omar and Eric Swalwell may find themselves on the back bench with a new Republican majority eager to follow Mrs. Pelosi’s example and strip the opposing team’s members of committee assignments.
All this tit for tat will further undermine our institutions and polarize the nation—but such is the nature of retributive politics. Which is why the wholesale Democratic and media defense of this week’s events is so reckless. Both parties long understood that political restraint was less about civility than self-preservation. What goes around always comes around. What went around this week will come around hard.
To coin a 2016-era Insta-phrase, choose the form of your destructor.
CLIMATE CHANGE: Increased solar activity creates new challenges for smallsats.
MY NEW YORK POST COLUMN IS ON PUBLIC-CHOICE ECONOMICS: Woke elites control the institutions meant to serve us.
PIVOT! Biden relaunches national initiative Cancer Moonshot to accelerate fight against cancer.
President Joe Biden is relaunching a national campaign to accelerate the rate of progress against cancer, he announced Wednesday.
First launched in 2016, Cancer Moonshot aims to reduce the cancer death rate by at least half over the next 25 years. It will also aim to improve the experience of survivors or those fighting cancer. A Cancer Cabinet will be formed as part of the initiative.
The announcement included a call to action to jump-start cancer screenings, more than 9.5 million of which have been delayed due to COVID-19. The administration has also set aside budgets for biomedical and health research through entities like the National Cancer Institute and the National Institutes of Health.
Typing up press releases on the “Cancer Moonshot” seems to be the Biden administration’s regular “Stray Voltage” fallback in a desperate attempt to get bad news out of the news cycle. Flashback: Desperately Unpopular Biden Makes Play to Control Cancer Cures With ‘Moonshot.’
—Athena Thorne, PJM, February 2nd.
No word yet if the “Cancer Moonshot” will cure the deadly strain of #OilCancer that emanates from oily windshields.
Flashback to January, 2016: Obama’s new, new!, new!!, new!!!, new!!!! war on cancer. ICYMI: Nixon started giving cancer the Apollo treatment in 1971.
Obama, 2016: “Last year, Vice President Biden said that with a new moonshot, America can cure cancer. Last month, he worked with this Congress to give scientists at the National Institutes of Health the strongest resources that they’ve had in over a decade. So tonight, I’m announcing a new national effort to get it done. And because he’s gone to the mat for all of us on so many issues over the past 40 years, I’m putting Joe in charge of Mission Control. For the loved ones we’ve all lost, for the families that we can still save, let’s make America the country that cures cancer once and for all.”
To be fair, between the out of control inflation and oil crisis he triggered, and this week’s raid on Mar-a-Lago, Biden has been doing quite a fair Nixon impersonation himself.
BIDEN DOES HIS BEST BANANA REPUBLIC IMPRESSION:
The United States isn’t a banana republic. It is doing quite a convincing impression of one, however. On Monday night, the FBI raided Donald Trump’s residence in Mar-a-Lago, apparently looking for evidence that the 45th president, a spring chicken at seventy-six, had hidden official documents in contravention of the Presidential Records Act — an offense that could see him barred from returning to office. Legal scholars are by no means sure that anybody would be able to prove that Trump willfully withheld sensitive government records — after all, the FBI said that Hillary Clinton had been “extremely careless” with her emails as Secretary of State, then a State Department investigation declared her not guilty of deliberately mishandling evidence. Still, the authorities didn’t break into any of Clinton’s homes (not publicly, anyway), and so Monday’s raid looks a lot like what Trump says it is — an act of political intimidation you might expect from a tinpot dictatorship in the developing world; a desperate bid to find something — anything — that might prevent Trump running for the White House again in 2024.
Within a few hours, almost as if he knew it had been coming, Trump released a video that resembled nothing so much as a presidential campaign announcement. “We are a nation that has in many ways become a joke,” declares the Donald on film, as gloomy black-and-white images turn to vivid color. “But soon we will have greatness again.”
Perhaps the FBI knows something very damning about Trump that we don’t. If not, why would the Bureau, or possibly Attorney General Merrick Garland, do something that appears so neatly to validate the Trumpist refrain that the “Deep State” will stop at nothing to take down their hero? Why would Trump’s enemies give him a near-perfect launchpad opportunity?
Conspiracy theories sprout everywhere. One is that the FBI — led as it is by a Trump appointee, Christopher Wray — is at some level working with — not against — Trump in order to help absolve him in the public eye over his behavior in the aftermath of the November 2020 election. Another, slightly less far-fetched idea is that the Democrats are trying to goad the Donald into announcing his 2024 campaign before the fast-approaching midterm elections. That would be because the dreaded idea of a Trump comeback might mobilize Democratic voters in the coming months and help prevent a Republican “red wave” at the ballot in November.
What’s certain is the Republicans are itching to start counter-investigations into the Biden administration as soon as their party seizes control of Congress. Hours after the Trump raid, House Minority leader Kevin McCarthy declared: “When Republicans take back the House, we will conduct immediate oversight of this department, follow the facts, and leave no stone unturned. Attorney General Garland, preserve your documents and clear your calendar.”
Biden’s White House has gotten so bad that actual banana republics are looking down at us: President of El Salvador bashes US government over FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago. “The leader of El Salvador chided the FBI’s raid on Mar-a-Lago, rhetorically asking what the United States would say if he did something similar.”
RACISM, STRAIGHT UP: Bari Weiss: New York Times editor wanted Schumer to OK op-ed by GOP Sen. Tim Scott.
TOP STORIES ON MIT’S TECHNOLOGY REVIEW THIS MORNING:
“Why can’t tech fix its gender problem? A new generation of tech activists, organizers, and whistleblowers, most of whom are female, non-white, gender-diverse, or queer, may finally bring change.”
“The Download: psychedelics for women, and Roe v. Wade online.”
“Psychedelics are having a moment and women could be the ones to benefit.”
“The cognitive dissonance of watching the end of Roe unfold online.”
Really bearing down on the science and engineering there, folks. I remember when people thought woke politics was something that didn’t affect STEM.
MADE IN THE USA: Flag Pole Kit 6 Ft Flagpole with Embroidered American Flag. #CommissionEarned (Bumped)
OCEANIA HAS NEVER BEEN AT WAR WITH MAR-A-LAGO: MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle Demands You Stop Calling The FBI Mar-a-Lago Raid a Raid!
On MSNBC’s The 11th Hour, host Stephanie Ruhle spent the opening segment of her show on Tuesday evening with her assembled panel to discuss the fallout from the FBI’s raid on former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida. While the panel discussion itself could constitute a NewsBusters blog in and of itself, what Ruhle said at the end of the segment outshined everything else in its stupidity.
Wrapping up the segment and about to head to a commercial break, Ruhle sanctimoniously claimed the FBI raid on Trump’s Florida home wasn’t actually a raid. “We keep hearing a lot of people call what the FBI did at Mar-a-Lago a raid. But for fact’s sake here’s the deal, law enforcement doesn’t even use the term raid,” Ruhle wailed.
She’s far from alone: Taking Cue From Dems, Media Abandon ‘Raid’ To Describe Trump FBI Raid (Video).
THEY’RE SO CUTE WHEN THEY’RE YOUNG: Scientists detect newborn planet that could be forming moons.
DISPATCHES FROM THE HOUSE OF STEPHANOPOULOS: ABC guest blames FBI raid anger on Neo-Nazis because Merrick Garland is Jewish.
JUST NOW: ABC guest blames FBI raid anger on Neo-Nazis because Merrick Garland is Jewish pic.twitter.com/VanMiArgmI
— Jack Poso 🇺🇸 (@JackPosobiec) August 11, 2022
As Ace of Spades writes, “Which, by the way, I didn’t know. That name sounds so Waspy it could have been in Bonfire of the Vanities.”