“Donald Trump’s accusation that the Obama administration conducted an investigation, including wiretapping, against his campaign has reignited the debate about his, ahem, unorthodox way of counterpunching against opponents.
Liberals are convinced that Trump is acting like a sinister Darth Vader character by using distraction to cover up a huge scandal involving Team Trump’s ties to Russia. Mainstream media types view Trump as an impulsive Inspector Clouseau–type character, improvising stories as he goes along.Jake Tapper of CNN tweeted a criticism of Trump’s behavior: “POTUS makes wild accusation w/zero evidence . . . WH tells Congress to find evidence/no further comment.”
Trump supporters have fallen back on speculating that the president is like Columbo, the seemingly disorganized TV detective who always traps his quarry at the last minute…
Regardless of who is right, wrong, or merely confused on the issue of Trump, Obama, and Russia, the president’s behavior is a recipe for exasperation and mistrust among his allies. “How in the world can we go out on a limb for a guy who won’t tell us in advance that it won’t be sawed off,” one GOP congressman who was an early backer of Trump told me. “If you head a team, you have to lead it.”
If Donald Trump is playing the role of a canny Columbo in checkmating his adversaries, it’s not obvious. With his impulsive tweeting, he more closely resembles a high-tech version of stumbling Inspector Clouseau.“
And for heaven’s sake, at the risk of repetition, if you’re going to tweet, PLEASE have someone with an advanced degree in English review your grammar and sentence structure prior to transmission.
In another Trump-related item also courtesy of NRO, Andrew McCarthy details how…
“…For months, the media-Democrat complex has peddled a storyline that the Putin regime in Russia hacked the U.S. presidential election. There is, of course, no evidence that the election was hacked in the sense that the actual voting process was compromised. Rather, there is evidence that e-mail accounts of prominent Democrats were hacked months before the election, and thousands of those e-mails were published by WikiLeaks in the months leading up to the election.
Into this misleading “Russia hacked the election” narrative, the press and the Dems injected a second explosive allegation — or at least an explosive suspicion that they’ve wanted us to perceive as a credible allegation meriting a serious investigation. The suspicion/allegation is: Not only did Russia hack the election, but there are also enough ties between people in the Trump orbit and operatives of the Putin regime that there are grounds to believe that the Trump campaign was complicit in Russia’s hacking of the election.
Transparently, the aim is to undermine the legitimacy of Trump’s election victory.
…But still, the media and Democrats have always had a serious vulnerability here — one they’ve never acknowledged because they’ve been too swept away by the political success of the fantasy narrative.It is this: At a certain point, if compelling evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia to steal the election did not materialize, the much more interesting question becomes “How did the government obtain all this information that has been leaked to the media to prop up the story?”
The most plausible answer to that question: The Obama administration, through the Justice Department and the FBI, was investigating the associates of the opposition party’s presidential nominee, and perhaps even the nominee himself, during the campaign.Otherwise, what explanation can there be for all of the investigative information — much of it classified, and thus illegal to disclose — that has been funneled to the press?
In short, the media and Democrats have been playing with fire for months. The use of law-enforcement and national-security assets to investigate one’s political opponents during a heated election campaign has always been a potentially explosive story.Let’s not kid ourselves: If the roles were reversed, and a Republican administration had investigated officials tied to the campaign of the Democrats’ nominee, we would be drowning in a sea of Watergate 2.0 coverage.
Well, this weekend, the potentially explosive story detonated. It happened in the now familiar way: jaw-dropping tweets by President Trump.
Given the abundance of indications that the Obama Justice Department scrutinized his campaign, or at least his associates, it was odd that the president chose to tweet the one allegation in the whole mess that appears insupportable — viz., that President Obama had had candidate Trump wiretapped. To my knowledge, no such suggestion has ever been publicly reported. At most, it has been reported (but not proved) that there was a FISA application in June that “named Trump” – but, as I’ve pointed out, saying someone was named in an application does not mean that person was targeted for eavesdropping. And, in any event, the reporting tells us that if there was such an application, the FISA court denied it. Thus, I know of no basis to believe that Trump himself was wiretapped; and if the president’s objective was to sensationalize the story, it would surely have been enough to tweet out a colorable fear that surveillance of him — as a Russian agent — had been proposed.
But was the overstatement slyly intentional? Was Trump trying to make a point?
Maybe not. It is certainly possible that the president was angry and the tweets result from a fit of pique. On the other hand, though, how much crazier is it for Trump to contend that Obama ordered spying on Trump than for the media and Democrats to have contended, for month upon month, that Trump’s campaign conspired with the Putin regime to steal the American presidential election and turn the Oval Office into occupied Kremlin territory?
It is probable that both allegations are ludicrous.
Then again, as Catherine Herridge reports, maybe not!
There is a good case, though, that there’s more support for the former than the latter.
Here’s the most interesting part: Now that they’ve been called on it, the media and Democrats are gradually retreating from the investigation they’ve been touting for months as the glue for their conspiracy theory. It’s actually quite amusing to watch: How dare you suggest President Obama would ever order surveillance! Who said anything about FISA orders? What evidence do you lunatic conservatives have — uh, other than what we media professionals been reporting — that there was any investigation of the Trump campaign?
You will hear more righteous indignation in the coming days, no doubt. The first brushback pitches came this weekend: the claim that if President Trump dares to demand that the FBI and Justice Department show him the supposed FISA applications, he will be engaged in unprecedented political interference in the independence of law enforcement.It’s a silly assertion; as I explained over the weekend, FISA surveillance is not law enforcement, it is national security.A chief executive who demanded to review FISA information (obtained by exercise of the executive’s power) would be doing his main job — to protect the country — not interfering in a judicial proceeding.
But have you noticed? While all this head-spinning legal jibber-jabber goes back and forth, the foundation of the false narrative we’ve been hearing since November 8 has vanished.Now that we’re supposed to believe there was no real investigation of Trump and his campaign, what else can we conclude but that there was no real evidence of collusion between the campaign and Russia…which makes sense, since Russia did not actually hack the election, so the purported objective of the collusion never existed.
Trick or tweet?”
Here’s the juice: this is without question a deliberate Dimocratic disinformation drive designed to disable the democratic process by debilitating a duly-elected President, wholeheartedly aided and abetted by the MSM and treasonous elements in the intelligence community.
That being said, the effort could not have met with nearly the success it has thus far without the unforced errors and unintentional support of Team Trump.
Next up, as Mary Anastasia O’Grady reports at the WSJ, The Obamao’s fingerprints are all over the scene of the crime after…
“Score another kill for the Cuban military dictatorship (Along with its anti-American enabler, B. Hussein Jefe): Last month it eliminated Afro-Cuban dissident Hamell Santiago Más Hernández, an inmate of one of its most notoriously brutal prisons.
The remarkable thing was not the death of a critic. That’s routine in a police state that holds all the guns, bayonets, money and food. What’s noteworthy is that the world hardly blinked, which is to say that two years after President Obama’s detente with Raúl Castro, the regime still dispatches adversaries with impunity. It also routinely blocks visitors to the island, even of the leftist stripe—more on this in a moment—in order to keep the population isolated. “Normalization” to the contrary, Cuba is the same totalitarian hellhole that it has been for the past 58 years.
Forty-five-year-old Más Hernández was a member of the Patriotic Union of Cuba, a group working for a peaceful transition to democracy. He was healthy when he was arrested in June and sentenced to four years in prison for “disrespect for authority”—a k a failure to bow to the masters of the slave plantation. His real crime was advocating for a free Cuba while black.There are few more lethal combinations.
“What’s a few hundred thousand dead dissidents between Communist compadres?!?”
The black Cuban is supposed to show gratitude to the revolution to sustain the myth that he has been elevated by communism. The grim reality is the opposite, but heaven help those who dare to say so.
In November, Más Hernández was transferred to Combinado del Este prison, a dungeon not fit for animals. There he developed a kidney infection. His wife told the independent media in Cuba that he lost almost 35 pounds. According to his overlords he died on Feb. 24 of a “heart attack.”Funny, that epidemic of heart disease among those who cross Castro.
His death ought to prick the conscience of the free world. But while the island is crawling with foreign news bureaus, the story has not appeared in the English-language press.President Obama may have opened Cuba to more tourists, but the regime takes pains to keep its 11 million captive souls and their misery invisible…”
C’mon…does anyone seriously believe the Islamofascist who sacrificed four Americans in Benghazi to preserve his reelection could care less about the life of a single Cuban dissident?!?
Speaking of The Dear Misleader’s disdain for the lives of those he swore to protect, our old friend and Naval Academy classmate Jim Gould forwarded the following factoid from The Daily Caller:
“A record 16 out of 100 Navy women are reassigned from ships to shore duty due to pregnancy, according to data obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by The Daily Caller News Foundation’s Investigative Group.
That number is up 2 percent from 2015, representing hundreds more who have to cut their deployments short, taxing both their unit’s manpower, military budgets and combat readiness. Further, such increases cast a shadow over the lofty gender integration goals set by former President Barack Obama. (Which were politically-correct bullsh*t to begin with.)
Overall, women unexpectedly leave their stations on Navy ships as much as 50% more frequently to return to land duty, according to documents obtained from the Navy. The statistics were compiled by the Navy Personnel Command at the request of TheDCNF, covering the period from January 2015 to September 2016.
The evacuation of pregnant women is costly for the Navy. Jude Eden, a nationally known author about women in the military who served in 2004 as a Marine deployed to Iraq said a single transfer can cost the Navy up to $30,000 for each woman trained for a specific task, then evacuated from an active duty ship and sent to land.That figure translates into $115 million in expenses for 2016 alone…”
And as Harry Callahan so eloquently put it…
The pregnancy issue has been recognized as a huge problem for some time; but a pliant Ray Mabus and Mike Mullen were only too happy to follow orders to bury the story.
What’s perhaps more important is the fact even when not pregnant, like their Army and Marine counterparts relative worthlessness in actual combat, in the event of a fire afloat, the most serious shipboard emergency imaginable, female sailors are about as useful as tits on a boar…as the vast majority of ladies, through no fault of their own, do not possess the upper body strength to move fully-charged fire hoses and other equipment through the tightly compartmented confines of a combat vessel…thus effectively rendering the ship undermanned in the best of circumstances.
Thus did Mike, Ray, and the rest of the Defense Department divas who valued personal advancement and profit more important than military readiness and national security sacrifice their honor and self-respect on the altar of The Obamao’s agenda of social change.
Oh, and we may be wrong, but wethinks the Marines are about to be tailhooked:
“In the ancient days, before we had 15-minute outrages over controversial tweets, we had year-long outrages over controversial books. Charles Murray, co-author of The Bell Curve, wrote a book that is doomed to be forever more read about than read. The great irony of his literary life is that, having written what is surely the 20th century’s most famous book about intelligence, he is doomed to endure the eternal rage of people uninterested in employing any of their own.
Murray was invited by Middlebury College to give a talk about the ideas considered in his second-most famous book, Coming Apart, in which he explores the role of factors such as family, marriage, and work ethic in the divergence between the white upper class and the white lower class. He concludes that changes in how we live (especially in how and whether we marry) since the 1960s have led to a situation in which the upper classes and the lower classes live in effectively separate cultures.
Of course there was going to be a protest. Charles Murray is used to protests: If he opens a box of Cracker Jack, there is no prize at the bottom, just some angry Haverford College sophomore calling him a racist.If he were protested any more widely, he’d be the Vietnam War. But, usually, he is also permitted to speak, free speech being a two-way street. (Except in the Liberal confines of La La Land!)
…This is a remarkable story for two reasons. The first is that the Middlebury administration behaved admirably, which is, unhappily, not normally the case.The administration invited Murray, kept the invitation in the face of protest, provided an alternative arrangement, and appears to be, at the very least, committed to investigating the violence that was done to its professor. That is more than most colleges can say. The second remarkable feature is the implacable stupidity and thuggishness of the Middlebury students.Perhaps inspired by Berkeley’s incendiary protests against an alt-right provocateur invited to that campus, Middlebury’s mob of little suppressors shows a campus culture in which the Left is dedicated not only to eliminating the expression of dissident points of view but also to physically punishing such expression.
Murray considers the scene:
That leads me to two critical questions for which I have no empirical answers: What is the percentage of tenured faculty on American campuses who are still unambiguously on the side of free intellectual exchange? What is the percentage of them who are willing to express that position openly? I am confident that the answer to the first question is still far greater than fifty percent. But what about the answer to the second question?My reading of events on campuses over the last few years is that a minority of faculty are cowing a majority in the same way that a minority of students are cowing the majority.
The Boston Globe reports that “students and professors at Middlebury College were ashamed and embarrassed” of the episode, as they should be. The question, then, is: What are they going to do about it?
This reminds us of the eternal question posed to supposed “moderate” Muslims regarding what they’re willing to do to combat the impact of their far more intemperate brethren.
Question: The flashpoint of the controversy about race and IQ was about genes. If you mention “The Bell Curve” to someone, they’re still likely to say “Wasn’t that the book that tried to prove blacks were genetically inferior to whites?” How do you respond to that?
Answer:Actually, Dick and I got that reaction even while we were working on the book.As soon as someone knew we were writing a book about IQ, the first thing they assumed was that it would focus on race, and the second thing they assumed was that we would be talking about genes.I think psychiatrists call that “projection.” Fifty years from now, I bet those claims about “The Bell Curve” will be used as a textbook case of the hysteria that has surrounded the possibility that black-white differences in IQ are genetic.Here is the paragraph in which Dick Herrnstein and I stated our conclusion:
If the reader is now convinced that either the genetic or environmental explanation has won out to the exclusion of the other, we have not done a sufficiently good job of presenting one side or the other. It seems highly likely to us that both genes and the environment have something to do with racial differences. What might the mix be? We are resolutely agnostic on that issue; as far as we can determine, the evidence does not yet justify an estimate. (p. 311)
That’s it. The whole thing.The entire hateful Herrnstein-Murray pseudoscientific racist diatribe about the role of genes in creating the black-white IQ difference. We followed that paragraph with a couple pages explaining why it really doesn’t make any difference whether the differences are caused by genes or the environment.But nothing we wrote could have made any difference. The lesson, subsequently administered to James Watson of DNA fame, is that if you say it is likely that there is any genetic component to the black-white difference in test scores, the roof crashes in on you.
We’d be willing to bet the vast majority of those protesting words they’ve never read haven’t ever been spanked, let alone had their ass kicked when they richly deserved it. We for one would be more than willing to advance their education.
No kidding: at some point, these mindless miscreants are going to assault someone who takes their threat seriously. And then another someone, hopefully on the side of Progressive intolerance, is going to pay the ultimate price. So when it happens…and if events to date are any guide, it’s inevitable…please don’t attempt to blame the side of 1st Amendment tolerance.
Turning now to The Lighter Side…
Finally, we’ll call it a wrap with what could be the most uninteresting interview ever offered:
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