It’s Wednesday, April 5th, 2017…but before we begin, a comment and a question. First, submitted for your perusal, another of those pictures worth far more than a thousand words which epitomizes the inevitably counterproductive qualities of Progressive policies:
Now for the question: particularly in light of this latest information dragged from the jaws of the federal bureaucracy by Judicial Watch, why on earth is John Koskinen still running the IRS…
“Former President Barack Obama’s national security adviser Susan Rice ordered U.S. spy agencies to produce “detailed spreadsheets” of legal phone calls involving Donald Trump and his aides when he was running for president, according to former U.S. Attorney Joseph diGenova.
“What was produced by the intelligence community at the request of Ms. Rice were detailed spreadsheets of intercepted phone calls with unmasked Trump associates in perfectly legal conversations with individuals,” diGenova told The Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group Monday.
“The overheard conversations involved no illegal activity by anybody of the Trump associates, or anyone they were speaking with,” diGenova said. “In short, the only apparent illegal activity was the unmasking of the people in the calls.”
Other official sources with direct knowledge and who requested anonymity confirmed to TheDCNF diGenova’s description of surveillance reports Rice ordered one year before the 2016 presidential election.
…In response to a question Tuesday from NBC News reporter Andrea Mitchell,…Susan Rice denied that she “prepared” spreadsheets of surveilled telephone calls involving Donald Trump and his aides.
…Former U.S. Attorney Joe DiGenova, one of TheDCNF’s sources, said Tuesday in response to Rice that her denial “would come as quite a surprise to the government officials who have reviewed dozens of those spreadsheets…”
In a related item courtesy of NRO, Andrew McCarthy terms this latest bombshell…
“The thing to bear in mind is that the White House does not do investigations. Not criminal investigations, not intelligence investigations.
Remember that.
Why is that so important in the context of explosive revelations that Susan Rice, President Obama’s national-security adviser, confidant, and chief dissembler, called for the “unmasking” of Trump campaign and transition officials whose identities and communications were captured in the collection of U.S. intelligence on foreign targets?
Because we’ve been told for weeks that any unmasking of people in Trump’s circle that may have occurred had two innocent explanations: (1) the FBI’s investigation of Russian meddling in the election and (2) the need to know, for purposes of understanding the communications of foreign intelligence targets, the identities of Americans incidentally intercepted or mentioned. The unmasking, Obama apologists insist, had nothing to do with targeting Trump or his people.
That won’t wash.
In general, it is the FBI that conducts investigations that bear on American citizens suspected of committing crimes or of acting as agents of foreign powers. In the matter of alleged Russian meddling, the investigative camp also includes the CIA and the NSA. All three agencies conducted a probe and issued a joint report in January. That was after Obama, despite having previously acknowledged that the Russian activity was inconsequential, suddenly made a great show of ordering an inquiry and issuing sanctions.
Consequently, if unmasking was relevant to the Russia investigation, it would have been done by those three agencies. And if it had been critical to know the identities of Americans caught up in other foreign intelligence efforts, the agencies that collect the information and conduct investigations would have unmasked it. Because they are the agencies that collect and refine intelligence “products” for the rest of the “intelligence community,” they are responsible for any unmasking; and they do it under “minimization” standards that FBI Director James Comey, in recent congressional testimony, described as “obsessive” in their determination to protect the identities and privacy of Americans.
Understand: There would have been no intelligence need for Susan Rice to ask for identities to be unmasked.If there had been a real need to reveal the identities — an intelligence need based on American interests — the unmasking would have been done by the investigating agencies. The national-security adviser is not an investigator. She is a White House staffer.
The president’s staff is a consumer of intelligence, not a generator or collector of it. If Susan Rice was unmasking Americans, it was not to fulfill an intelligence need based on American interests; it was to fulfill a political desire based on Democratic-party interests…”
Rice reminds us of Jake’s classic excuse-a-thon in The Blues Brothers:
As as one wag observed, “Case closed then. She lied before, now she’s telling the truth. Who could doubt her?!?”
Certainly not the Progressive propagandists at CNN, whose latest knee-jerk defense of anything/everything Obamao solidified the network as the American equivalent of Pravda:
Long bereft of any semblance of credibility, all the CNN clowns have left is the egg on their faces…along with other…
…less savory substances.
This will never rise to the level of Watergate, mainly because no one’s going to implicate B. Hussein, though it’s undeniable he was the nexus of every scandal his Administration inflicted upon America, including but not limited to the Trump surveillance, the IRS, Benghazi, Fast & Furious, the Iran debacle, etc., etc., etc., ad infinitum and ad nauseam.
Furthermore, unless the Republicans and/or Jeff Sessions grow a set, none of The Dear Misleader’s minions will ever set foot in a courtroom, let alone see the inside of a prison cell.
Since we’re on the subject of where Hillary should spend the rest of her unnatural life, also courtesy of NRO, Simone Grace Seol records what happens…
On March 31, South Korea’s former president, Park Geun-hye, was arrested on corruption and extortion charges. Just 20 days earlier, she had been impeached in a historic unanimous ruling by the Constitutional Court. The majority of South Koreans believe that this has been a deeply disgraceful month for national politics; they could not be more wrong.
Park’s fall from grace is a triumph of the rule of law and a post-partisan popular will, remarkable in such a young republic. Democracies everywhere should take note…
…One hopes that, with a new president to be elected in May, Seoul will be a more effective defender of democratic principles in the region and ally to America. One also hopes that, at least for a minute, feckless leaders around the world learn a healthy fear of the rule of law.“
Especially here at home:
Next, for those unfamiliar with the facts regarding how we got to where we are, Townhall.com‘s Guy Benson offers this…
Here’s the juice: after murdering Mary Jo Kopechne, assassinating the character of Robert Bork was easy…even for someone kicked out of Harvard for plagiarism!
And though we’re uncertain “punish” is the proper term, paybacks are most assuredlyHELL; having sown the wind, Dimocrats are now reaping the whirlwind, as Marc Thiessen records at the WaPo:
“…Moreover, Democrats have no one to blame but themselves for the bind they are in.At every step along the way, they are the ones who broke long-standing precedent on judicial nominations.During the George W. Bush administration, they used the filibuster to block the nomination of Miguel Estrada — a supremely qualified nominee for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit who had the support of a clear majority in the Senate. Estrada was the first appeals court nominee ever to have been successfully filibustered. And he was not alone. Democrats blocked 10 Bush judicial nominees in 2003 and 2004 in this way.
So when President Barack Obama was elected and Democrats had control of the Senate, Republicans used the precedent Democrats had set. Democrats responded by breaking precedent yet again — this time changing the Senate rules to eliminate the filibuster for all nominees except for the Supreme Court, including lifetime appointments to the federal circuit courts. They did this so that Obama could pack the courts with liberal judges that could not meet the 60-vote “standard.” And pack the courts he did. Obama appointed more than a third of all federal judges and flipped most of the circuit courts of appeal from conservative to liberal majorities.
Now, after that sordid history,Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) sayswith a straight face that “when a nominee doesn’t get 60 votes, you shouldn’t change the rules, you should change the nominee”?Please.Once the line was crossed for lifetime appointments to the federal bench, Republicans can now rightly ask: If Democrats yet again do something unprecedented in U.S. history and filibuster Gorsuch, why not follow the precedent Democrats set and extend their rules to Supreme Court nominees?
And let’s be clear: That is precisely what Democrats planned to do if Hillary Clinton had been elected. Last year, when everyone still thought that Clinton was going to be elected and Democrats appeared likely to win back control of the Senate, vice-presidential nominee Sen. Tim Kaine (Va.) said Democrats would go nuclear if Republicans filibustered her Supreme Court nominee. “If [Republicans] think they’re going to stonewall the filling of that vacancy…then a Democratic Senate majority will say, ‘We’re not going to let you thwart the law.’ We will change the Senate rules to uphold the law.”
Now Kaine and his fellow Democrats are the ones “stonewalling” and “thwarting the law.” So they have nothing to complain about if the Republican Senate majority follows their advice and precedent and votes to “change the Senate rules to uphold the law…”
For more on the man everyone considers to be the…
…again courtesy of NRO, Matthew Continetti confirms Chuckie to be…
“The late terrorist Yasser Arafat (1929-2004) was famous for saying one thing to American media and the opposite to Palestinian audiences. To U.S. presidents and chief diplomatic correspondents he would profess his desire for peace and for a two-state solution, while to Arabs and Muslims he would impugn Jews, hint at Israel’s abolition, and incite and pay for anti-Semitic violence. His problem was that, like most liars, he was eventually found out. President George W. Bush saw through Arafat’s skein of deception and disengaged from the self-defeating “peace process” that he had manipulated to his advantage for decades. By the time of Arafat’s death, it was clear that any practical improvement in the Israeli-Palestinian relationship would have to bypass the Palestinian autocrat. He just couldn’t be trusted.
It is by this standard that I hereby judge Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer to be the Yasser Arafat of the Democratic party. Schumer is so practiced at saying one thing to Democratic elites and another to the Democratic base that it is easy to fall for his charade. But neither Arafat nor Schumer should fool you. Schumer is a hypocrite and a liar and out for no one but himself. And it is for these reasons that his threat to filibuster Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch should be viewed with incredulity.
Schumer says he will vote against bringing the Gorsuch nomination to the floor of the Senate. He urges his fellow Senate Democrats to do the same. His decision is chum in the water for the frenzied “resistance” to President Trump, which has decided that a judge who was approved to the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals with Democratic support — including Schumer’s — and whose fans include President Obama’s former solicitor general and legal scholar Cass Sunstein is somehow a jurisprudential freak who should be prevented from joining the Supreme Court by extraordinary means. The conventional wisdom in Washington, taking Schumer at his word, holds that enough Democrats will follow their leader to force Mitch McConnell to change the Senate rules. This is the so-called “nuclear option” on which Democrats were ready to act had they won last November. But of course they didn’t win. So now 60 votes is “the appropriate standard for a Supreme Court nominee,” Schumer said this week. Another lie.
…Conniving, spineless, duplicitous, misleading, double-crossing — Chuck Schumer is a fitting exemplar for the modern Democratic party. All he needs is the keffiyeh.“
That…and two behind the ear.
Moving on, also brought to us by NRO, Jonah Goldberg relates something most of you already knew as regards…
“…The Washington Post ran a profile of Vice President Mike Pence’s wife, Karen, and lots of people are outraged or repulsed that two Evangelical Christians do things that are fairly normal for Evangelical Christians to do. Specifically, Mike Pence apparently doesn’t dine alone with women or attend events where alcohol is served if his wife doesn’t accompany him. Perhaps this practice started when he was in Congress, a place where many a politician has ruined his marriage and career by not following such rules.
In response, there’s been a lot of cheap mockery from prominent liberal writers and activists. It’s an affront to working women! He’s a Christian weirdo! He thinks a meal with any woman will lead to sex! (Which, were he dining with Sandra Fluke…
…would have been a reasonable expectation!)
A lot of conservatives have leapt to the Pences’ defense — and rightly so. Mollie Hemingway of the Federalist concentrated on how these rules help prevent infidelity: “Good on Mike Pence for acknowledging these truths and knowing his limits.” I agree. But it’s worth pointing out that infidelity needn’t be the issue. I doubt Pence would be a lothario save for those rules. Perhaps he followed them simply to reassure his wife?
Or maybe this is none of our business? That would certainly be the attitude of many liberals if Pence were a Democrat and had actually cheated on his wife.
Last summer, when Bill Clinton spoke about his wife at the Democratic convention (“In the spring of 1971, I met a girl . . . ”), liberals gushed at the “love story,” and the rule of the day was that marriage is complicated and the Clintons’ ability to stay married (though practically separated) was admirable. Besides, “Who are we to judge?” — no doubt Bill Clinton’s favorite maxim.
It’s a very strange place we’ve found ourselves in when elites say we have no right to judge adultery, but we have every right to judge couples who take steps to avoid it.
But ultimately, I don’t think the important double standard is about marriage or adultery. It’s about traditional Christians. If the Pences were Muslims and followed similar rules, as devout Muslims indeed might, I doubt there’d be anything like this kind of liberal scorn.
Of course, that’s unknowable. But liberals spend a lot of time and energy defending accommodations for religious Muslims — burqas, veils, gender segregation, etc. — that they would never make for committed Christians.
Part of it is coalitional. For instance, the feminist march on Washington — the one with all those women wearing female-genitalia hats — was co-chaired by Linda Sarsour, a committed Muslim who at times defends sharia law (including the Saudi ban on female drivers, for instance).
But part of it strikes me as a crude form of partisan bigotry born of a kind of self-loathing of America’s traditional culture…”
“Many secularists can’t understand — and can’t stand — Christianity but seem to have a bit of a soft spot for the “religion of peace.”“
Still, We have to love the response by one Andrew Exum writing at The Atlantic, who, while generally supportive of Pence’s position, finds it might limit advancement opportunities for females…if you’ll forgive the little bon mot…under Pence.
“…Mr. Exum doesn’t follow the Pence rule but says, “I am very reluctant to cast judgment on whatever measures a couple take to protect the sanctity of their marriage. I am married to a wonderful woman, and marriage is the most rewarding thing I have ever done. It’s also the hardest thing I have ever done, including parenting two small boys and making three combat deployments. Marriage is hard work, and when I see stories in the news about men and women who have strayed from their marriage vows, my first instinct is not to point and laugh but to instead be deeply saddened and reflect: There go I but for the grace of God.”
This column is concerned that both Mr. Exum’s faith and military training may be needed as he heads home this evening after telling the world that his marriage is harder than combat.Perhaps he will find it helpful to dine alone with his wife—and permit alcohol to be served.“
Which brings us, appropriately enough to today’s installment of The Lighter Side:
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