It’s Monday, April 3rd, 2017…but before we begin, news of a personal note. First, 38 years ago today we made our first carrier landing in the T-2C Buckeye:
We thought we’d died and gone to Heaven.
Four months and day later, the leggy little filly on whose birthday this momentous event fell made us realize the best was yet to come. We trust you’ll join us in wishing TLJ a VERY Happy Birthday…
…along with MANY happy returns.
Now, here’s The Gouge!
Leading off the initial edition of April, writing at his Private Papers, the great Victor Davis Hanson urges an embattled Devin Nunes to stay the course:
“…Nunes is currently not operating in a normal climate of trust.
…If anyone were in Nunes’s position, he or she might doubt that the new Trump administration could fully trust Director Comey or others in the intelligence agencies to provide disinterested appraisals of such information, given that a number of intelligence officials may themselves, in theory, have been involved in the intercepts and their dissemination. He might advise that any possible sources connected even remotely to the White House should have disclosed the existence of such information to his boss. Nor would he necessarily believe that Representative Adam Schiff (D., Calif.) would be a reliable partner on the intelligence committee. Would Schiff remain silent about the true significance of such information while it was being distilled and examined by the committee, given his previous public insistence that the committee had new information incriminating the Trump administration — though to date Schiff has not presented such information or even characterized it?
Some notion of such intrigue, or rather the former nexus between Congress, the Obama administration, the intelligence agencies, and the monitoring of incoming Trump officials, was inadvertently disclosed recently by former Obama-administration Department of Defense deputy assistant secretary and current MSNBC commentator Evelyn Farkas. In an interview that originally aired on March 2 and that was reported on this week by Fox, Farkas seemed to brag on air about her own efforts scrambling to release information on the incoming Trump team’s purported talks with the Russians. Farkas’s revelation might put into context the eleventh-hour Obama effort to more widely disseminate intelligence findings among officials, one that followed even earlier attempts to broaden access to Obama-administration surveillance:
I was urging my former colleagues and, frankly speaking, the people on the [Capitol] Hill. It was more actually aimed at telling the Hill people: Get as much information as you can, get as much intelligence as you can before President Obama leaves the administration, because I had a fear that somehow that information would disappear with the senior [Obama] people who left, so it would be hidden away in the bureaucracy — that the Trump folks — if they found out how we knew what we knew about their, about the Trump’s staff dealing with Russians that they would try to compromise those sources and methods, meaning we would no longer have access to that intelligence. So I became very worried because not enough was coming out into the open, and I knew that there was more.We have very good intelligence on Russia. So then I had talked to some of my former colleagues, and I knew that they were trying to also help get information to the Hill.
Here we see a former Defense Department official taking credit for urging the expansion and stepped-up dissemination of classified surveillance of the Trump transition team (“get as much information as you can”), and she is apparently unconcerned about the means used to attain that end. She seems to wish that members of Congress (“Hill people”) and others will have access to intercepts, but she expresses no worry over whether it was legal to do so and seems to wish that its political utility was maximized. She tells us this now, when she is a media pundit, though she remained silent about it when she worked for Hillary Clinton. Farkas finished her interview with co-host Mika Brzezinski with the odd repartee: “That’s why you have the leaking,” which sounds like a confession of the ideological fuel of those disclosures.
Note again that Farkas left the Defense Department in September 2015 and became an adviser to the Hillary Clinton campaign (which accused the Trump campaign of collusion with the Russians). One wonders how a political activist in 2016 was still influential enough to speed up the release of “what we knew.”
To quote what Churchill said of Russia, all this is “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.” The current intelligence world is imploding. It’s also one in which former CIA director John Brennan is on record having misled the nation about the nature of the drone program and collateral damage. He was forced to apologize in his past for his agency’s intercepts of information on U.S. Senate computers. He has not been shy about criticizing the incoming president.
A former director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, is on record having lied to the Senate about the nature of NSA surveillance of American citizens. More than 50 intelligence analysts also faulted Clapper for improperly pressuring staffers to “cook” CENTCOM reports so they’d conform to predetermined administration narratives about the supposed positive progress of Obama’s efforts to defeat ISIS. On whose ultimate authority Clapper acted we do not know. He did not meet a Petraeus-like fate for misleading government officials. Clapper too is on record being harshly critical of the incoming president.
There is no need to rehash the strange political career of FBI director James Comey during the 2016 election. As Andrew McCarthy has noted in his recent NRO analyses, news accounts alleged that Comey’s FBI investigations of supposed contacts between General Michael Flynn and the Russian ambassador were shared with Obama-administration officials — but why and how we are not sure. Comey himself was quick to note that his agency is investigating supposed collusion between Team Trump and Russia, but he refused to comment on whether or not the FBI is investigating possibly inappropriate or illegal intercepts of Trump officials and the surely illegal dissemination of intercepted info through leaks to favorable media.
Nunes in the past has said on the record that the FBI has not been prompt in complying with requests for information on its investigation of the intercepts concerning Flynn, Trump, and possible other Trump officials — and perhaps how such information was gathered, whether it was leaked, and on whose ultimate orders it was undertaken.
In addition, almost daily leaks and rumors continue, alleging that there is nebulous intelligence tying Trump to the Russians, even though intelligence officials have so far denied a factual basis for these allegations. Schiff, who is the leading Democratic member of the House Intelligence Committee, has claimed that his committee has new evidence of Russian collusion with Team Trump, as reported on March 23; he says that the evidence warrants a grand-jury inquiry, but he has not substantiated such allegations.No one has suggested that Schiff resign for such preemptory disclosures or apologize for mischaracterizing committee business.
Given this bizarre house of mirrors, Nunes seems to have decided to bypass the usual intelligence channels and go instead directly to the press and the president. In this way, interested parties may examine for themselves the explosive information that was directed his way.
Now that news of these latest disclosures is in the public domain, their validity eventually will rise or fall on their own merits. I think the very point of Nunes’s public announcement was to warn that what has so far been leaked to news agencies is not necessarily the truth, and to prod reluctant and possibly politicized agencies to cooperate with the committee’s review — and thereby to get to the bottom of a strange and sad chapter in American history. He has likely succeeded, and we should expect lots of investigations about what was heretofore selectively and opportunistically leaked classified material.“
Since VDH broached the subject of Andrew McCarthy, in his latest offering at NRO, the former assistant U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York who led the successful 1995 terrorism prosecution against Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman and eleven others accurately opines…
“…What happened here is very simple: Russia was unimportant to Democrats, was avoided by Democrats, until they needed to rationalize a stunning defeat.
Prior to November 8, Democrats had little interest in mentioning “Russia” or “Putin.”Oh, they sputtered out the words when they had no choice — not wanting to address the substance of some embarrassing e-mails, they had to shift attention to the nefarious theft of the e-mails.
Beyond that, attention to the Kremlin was bad news for Clinton.It invited scrutiny of the Clinton Foundation’s corrupt foreign dealings; the sulfurous interplay of Putin cronies, Bill Clinton’s lucrative speech racket, and Hillary’s biddable State Department that resulted in Russia’s acquisition of major U.S. uranium supplies; the embarrassing “Russian reset” whereby, during Clinton’s State Department stewardship, the supine Obama administration watched Putin capture territory in Eastern Europe and muscle into the Middle East, while arming and aligning with Iran; and the intriguing relationship between Podesta (the Clinton-campaign chairman and former Obama White House official) and Putin’s circle — specifically, a $35 million investment by a Putin-created venture capital firm, Rusano, into a small Massachusetts energy company, Joule Energy, just two months after Podesta joined Joule’s board. (Ruh roh, Rorge!)
So, while Donald Trump’s Russia rhetoric ranged from the unseemly (blowing kisses at an anti-American thug) to the delusional (the notion that Russia, Iran’s new friend, could be a reliable ally against jihadism) to the reprehensible (moral equivalence between the murderous Putin regime and American national-defense operations), Clinton’s own Russia baggage rendered her unable to exploit them.
It was only afterward, after she lost a contest she thought she had in the bag, that the election turned illegitimate.
It was only after the campaign — after Hillary’s baggage no longer mattered, after the Democrats decided that “Russia hacked the election” was a better storyline than “we ran a lousy candidate and have lost touch with Middle America” — that Obama made a show of vigorous action against the same “cyber espionage” he’d pooh-poohed as par for the course seemingly five minutes before. Suddenly, on his way out the door, the president who’d sat on his hands while Putin sacked Crimea, grabbed slices of Eastern Ukraine, and abetted Syrian war crimes was moved to eject Russian diplomats, shutter Russian installations, and impose sanctions for what his administration labeled “Significant Malicious Cyber-Enabled Activities…”
PLEASE, the hypocrisy is positively painful!
Turning from the positively painful to the tantamount to treason, courtesy of Tom Bakke and The Washington Free Beacon, Aaron MacLean relates…
“Imagine you are a young midshipman at the U.S. Naval Academy processing the news that Jim Webb—Annapolis class of ’68, recipient of the Navy Cross, former senator and secretary of the Navy, former member of the Annapolis faculty, bestselling novelist and acclaimed journalist—has been forced by political pressure to decline an award for distinguished alumni at your school this week.
The most widely cited reason for his political toxicity is an article he wrote in 1979 (side note: almost forty years ago!) in Washingtonian Magazine entitled “Women Can’t Fight.” Never mind that he has apologized for both the vivid language of his youth and the ways in which the article made life difficult for women already in the service. (“Clearly, if I had been a more mature individual, there are things that I would not have said in that magazine article. To the extent that this article subjected women at the Academy or the armed forces to undue hardship, I remain profoundly sorry.”) Never mind the fact that Webb was channeling the beliefs of the vast majority of his fellow infantrymen, if in somewhat impolitic language—or that even today, the vast majority of Marines of all grades oppose the inclusion of women in combat units. (And never mind every independent study of the issue has come to the same conclusion Webb reached!!!) Never mind that in 1987, as secretary of the Navy, Webb opened a tremendous number of new positions in the service to women. Most of all, never mind that as of December 2015, combat units were all opened to women by order of then-Secretary of Defense Carter, overriding the objections of the Marine Corps (though not of the Army).
In other words, the proponents of including women in combat units have won. (Hopefully, with Trump in the Oval Office and Mad Dog Mattis in the Pentagon, only temporarily.)But, as the case of Webb shows, that’s not enough. You have to salt the fields.
…Just as interesting is how Webb describes the manner in which pressure was applied. He was told “that my presence at the ceremony would likely mar the otherwise celebratory nature of that special day” in “conversations with the Alumni Association, including information passed down from top Navy leadership in the Pentagon.
A nation gets the military leadership it deserves. America’s future military leaders are learning some important lessons this week—just not the ones we should want.“
Here’s the juice: the issue of women in combat was never a legitimate question of military policy. Rather it has always represented a social engineering project in which Progressives could test their pet gender theories. In a similar fashion, the opposition to the legitimate election of Donald Trump…similar to that of George W. Bush before him…represents not legitimate electoral dissent (which should happen at the ballot box four years hence), but action in contravention of the Constitution; i.e., treason.
Frankly, we don’t give a fig about Feminazi feelings; Gloria Steinem, Hillary, B. Hussein, Ash Carter, Moon Mullens and the rest of the P.C.-obsessed nincompoops who promulgated this hopelessly misguided policy aren’t the ones who will by paying its price: THEY are:
And as the immortal Harry Callahan so eloquently observed:
Oh,…and for those upon who the reality of this issue is entirely lost, were they ever in the same arena, Floyd Mayweather would KILL…
Ronda Rousey…or any other woman against who he might be matched.
A fact you can believe is not lost upon the Russians, ChiComs, NoKos, Iranians or any other would-be foe of America.
Meanwhile, closer to home, as Andrew Branca notes at NRO…
The Mainstream Media Gets ‘Stand Your Ground’ Laws Wrong — Again
Why is it so hard for reporters to understand basic legal concepts?
Because they’re so invested in a fable which belies the truth…along the lines of Barry Obama being the Smartest Man in the World.
Which brings us, appropriately enough, to The Lighter Side…
Finally, we’ll call it a wrap with another sordid story straight from The Crime Blotter, courtesy of Bill Meisen, FOX 6 in Birmingham, AL and a very courageous citizen exercising his constitutional rights:
“For 21 years, John Croft lived in his Alabama home virtually problem-free until last summer. “I’ve been a prisoner in my house,” he said. Croft, who is 79, says the burglaries began last June. Since then, he says his Center Point house has been broken into 13 times.
The most recent case came around 1:15 Wednesday morning. “When I heard the noise, that’s when they opened the window from the basement coming to the level where the bedrooms are,” he recalled. Jefferson County deputies say there were two men inside. Another, driving the getaway car, waited outside.
“I have three bedrooms. I think they checked the other two bedrooms out and then he came over there and said, ‘Don’t move!’ He heard the bed squeak. I was getting my gun. He said, ‘Don’t move’ and he used the ‘N’ word and I shot,” Croft recounted later Wednesday. Croft says he didn’t know it at the time, but the suspect had shot him too, hitting him in the ankle.
“I hate that boy dead, but I don’t hate I shot him…”
Two memorable movie scenes come to mind: first, there’s the Jimmy Malone School of Current Circumstance, in which being alive beats the alternative. Malone, coming upon Elliott Ness expressing regret for killing a man who surely wouldn’t have hesitated to kill him, poses the question:
Malone: “Would you rather it was you?”
Ness: “No, I would not.”
Then there’s the Samuel L. Jackson School of Just Desserts:
John Croft is understandably somewhere in between. We’re just glad he’s alive to critique his own actions.
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