Briefly Noted: The Left's Looming Civil War

There's not that much real news today. Probably the biggest bit of news is Trump's pullback from Syria. I do wonder whether that is a signal to his base, which voted against perpetual war, that there continued support is appreciated.

However, there are some good opinion pieces that seem to coalesce around the idea that the Left--faced with total exposure by Trump and the Barr/Durham investigations--is willing to deploy the Samson Option: Tear this house down, rather than tolerate another Trump victory.

James Kunstler at Zerohedge leads off the roundup--"The Left Seems To Be Opting For Civil War":

A lot of readers (some of them former readers now) have been angrily twanging me by email for writing about the three-year Resistance effort to un-do the 2016 election. I did not vote for Mr. Trump (or Mrs. Clinton) but I resent the coup mounted to overthrow him. I object to the bad faith and dishonesty of the Resistance. I object to the criminal misconduct among the federal bureaucracy, and the mendacity of its partners in the news media, and the hysteria they continue to generate — at the expense of other matters that concern our future. 

... 

Beyond the ongoing orchestrated coup stands a reality-optional political Left consumed by serial hysterias, uninterested in truth, steeped in social despotism, and apparently willing to do anything to gain power. We should be very concerned with what they intend to do with that power. As they attempt to redistribute wealth, they will make the unhappy discovery that the wealth itself is subject to the wholesale contraction underway. The overvalued “assets” representing “money” hoarded by the “wealthy” will turn out to be figments of a runaway debt crisis. We have already debased the operations of banking, and the tokens that banks issue — currencies and securities — levitate over an abyss. 

We already have plenty of evidence for what the Left will do to the principle of political liberty. Their shibboleths of “diversity” and “inclusion” really mean shutting down free speech and telling everybody how to think. They are less interested in “social justice” than in plain coercion, the pleasure they take in pushing people around. What’s worse is that they want to use government as the instrument for enforcing their will. I object to that not just on principle but because government itself will be subject to the same contraction affecting everything else. It simply won’t be able to compensate for all the other losses. Can we downscale its activities coherently, or will we make that journey violently, in some sort of civil war? 

The Left seems to be opting for civil war. 

It is surely underway among branches of government and the administrative bureaucracy I call the Deep State. Barack Obama, John Brennan and others set the intel and police apparatus against Mr. Trump and the war goes on in the latest reckless campaign of “whistleblowers” who are no such thing, but rather agents provocateurs of the Central Intelligence Agency. 

The Democrats in congress play a dangerous game with this as they attempt to engineer a non-impeachment impeachment — ... 

The machinations of Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Rep. Adam Schiff in this latest “whistleblower” affair pulsate with skullduggery. 

Matt Taibbi at Rolling Stone (h/t commenter Brad Crawford) zeroes in on the non-whistleblower whistleblower aspect of this--The ‘Whistleblower’ Probably Isn’t; It’s an insult to real whistleblowers to use the term with the Ukrainegate protagonist. In particular, Taibbi points out the patent absurdity of the idea that our Intelligence Community would ever lionize a genuine whistleblower. The "Whistleblower Act" is essentially the Deep State gaslighting the public, suggesting to the American people that the Deep State works for them and is interested in transparency:

The unnamed person at the center of this story sure didn’t sound like a whistleblower. Our intelligence community wouldn’t wipe its ass with a real whistleblower. 

Americans who’ve blown the whistle over serious offenses by the federal government either spend the rest of their lives overseas, like Edward Snowden, end up in jail, like Chelsea Manning, get arrested and ruined financially, like former NSA official Thomas Drake, have their homes raided by FBI like disabled NSA vet William Binney, or get charged with espionage like ex-CIA exposer-of-torture John Kiriakou. It’s an insult to all of these people, and the suffering they’ve weathered, to frame the ballcarrier in the Beltway’s latest partisan power contest as a whistleblower. 

... 

I’ve met a lot of whistleblowers, in both the public and private sector. Many end up broke, living in hotels, defamed, (often) divorced, and lucky if they have any kind of job. One I knew got turned down for a waitressing job because her previous employer wouldn’t vouch for her. She had little kids. 

... 

Even former CIA official Robert Baer, no friend of Trump, said as much in an early confab on CNN with Brooke Baldwin:

BAER: That’s what I find remarkable, is that this whistleblower knew about that, this attempt to cover up. This is a couple of people. It isn’t just one.BALDWIN: And on the people point, if the allegation is true, Bob, what does it say that White House officials, lawyers, wanted to cover it up?BAER: You know, my guess, it’s a palace coup against Trump. And who knows what else they know at this point. 

That sounds about right. Actual whistleblowers are alone. 

The Ukraine complaint seems to be the work of a group of people, supported by significant institutional power, not only in the intelligence community, but in the Democratic Party and the commercial press. 

In this century we’ve lived through a president lying to get us into a war (that caused hundreds of thousands of deaths and the loss of trillions in public treasure), the deployment of a vast illegal surveillance program, a drone assassination campaign, rendition, torture, extralegal detention, and other offenses, many of them mass human rights violations. 

We had whistleblowers telling us about nearly all of these things. When they came forward, they desperately needed society’s help. They didn’t get it. Our government didn’t just tweet threats at them, but proceeded straight to punishment. 

Bill Binney, who lost both his legs to diabetes, was dragged out of his shower by FBI agents. Jeffrey Sterling, like Kiriakou, was charged with espionage for talking to a reporter. After conviction, he asked to be imprisoned near his wife in St. Louis. They sent him to Colorado for two years. Others tried to talk to congress or their Inspectors General, only to find out their communications had been captured and cc’ed to the very agency chiefs they wanted to complain about (including former CIA chief and current MSNBC contributor John Brennan). 

The current “scandal” is a caricature version of such episodes. Imagine the mania on the airwaves if Donald Trump were to have his Justice Department arrest the “whistleblower” and charge him with 35 years of offenses, as Thomas Drake faced. 

George Parry (h/t commenter Cassander) focuses on the element in the Ukraine call transcript that he believes has set the Left and its media surrogates in a frenzy--and also provides a useful summary to a key element of the Russia Hoax. I'm not sure that this is what set off the current impeachment frenzy, simply because this is a key to getting at the origins. Still, what Parry describes unquestionably demonstrated the seriousness of Trump, Barr, and Durham: 

CrowdStrike and the Impeachment Frenzy

No wonder the Dems are nervous: The alleged Russian hacking of the DNC’s computers is proving to be a Hillary campaign and DNC scam that went unchallenged by Messrs. Comey and Mueller.

Parry's article is very detailed, but here are excerpts that get at the heart of the Left's hysterical reaction:

In his telephone conversation with Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky, President Trump requested Ukraine’s help in getting “to the bottom of” the Russian collusion narrative and the role of CrowdStrike, a private computer security company, in propagating that story. Lost in the volcanic eruption of faux outrage and condemnation aimed at the president by the Democrats and their wholly owned media subsidiary, this reference to CrowdStrike indicates that the Justice Department’s investigation of the counterintelligence operation against candidate and president-elect Trump may be hot on the trail of exposing what could well be a seminal lie that the Democratic National Committee’s computer server was hacked by Russian operatives. 

... 

On July 22, 2016, just days before the Democratic National Convention, WikiLeaks published approximately 20,000 DNC emails. 

Much to the embarrassment of Hillary Clinton, the released files showed that the DNC had secretly collaborated with her campaign to promote her candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination over that of Bernie Sanders. This caused the Clinton campaign serious political damage at the Democratic convention.

Well after the convention, Jennifer Palmieri, Clinton’s public relations chief, said in a March 2017 Washington Post essay that she worked assiduously during the nominating convention to “get the press to focus on … the prospect that Russia had not only hacked and stolen emails from the DNC, but that it had done so to help Donald Trump and hurt Hillary.” 

In their breathless coverage of the Russian hacking story, the media downplayed the very odd behavior of the DNC, the putative victim. For, when the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI learned of the hacking claim, they asked to examine the server. 

But the DNC refused. 

... 

As the old saying goes, the cover-up is frequently worse than the crime. That certainly appears to be the case with the Russian hacking story given that Comey’s FBI and Team Mueller appear to have deliberately declined to probe the Russian hacking claim purveyed by the DNC and Hillary Clinton’s campaign with the assistance of CrowdStrike. 

So it is that Trump’s reference to CrowdStrike had to have sent shockwaves through the Democrats and their media enablers. Unless the DNC has followed Hillary Clinton’s example by using BleachBit or hammers on its computers, it is still possible that an honest direct access forensic analysis coupled with a simple records search by the NSA could prove that — in addition to Mueller’s finding of no evidence of collusion by the Trump campaign with Russia — the whole Russian hacking story was a scam orchestrated by the DNC and the Clinton campaign. 

No wonder the Democrats and their media co-conspirators are running around with their hair on fire.

And to prevent exposure of their wrongdoing the Left is doing their best to trash our constitutional order.