Turning Over The 2016 Rocks

That's the theme of Holman Jenkins' column in today's WSJ: "Who Will Turn Over the 2016 Rocks?" Jenkins, in line with his NeverTrumpism, buys into the idea that James Comey--among others--was "played by the Russians" (re a supposed forged email chain), even while backhandedly acknowledging the difficulties of that position:

"Making further mincemeat of Mr. Comey's rationale [the supposed email chain], the inspector general has revealed that his FBI colleagues judged the Russian intelligence to be 'objectively false' and possibly a Kremlin plant."

Nevertheless, Jenkins finishes off with some big picture observations of the lay of the land facing the Deep State and its Fourth Estate lackeys. I offer them here as food for thought for the Thanksgiving weekend, as we await solid news in the coming weeks:

Wafting above all is an odor of 1963, when the press deliberately ignored Lee Harvey Oswald's communist affiliations in favor of a distracting talking point about right-wing extremism in Dallas. Do I think the republic today can survive a full airing of the US intelligence community's inept actions in the 2016 race? Yes, and with minimal shock at this point. It's the FBI and CIA that are unlikely to survive without undergoing a sweeping institutional housecleaning. 

Which brings us to the latest inspector general's report due in a couple weeks, itself a down payment on a criminal investigation now in the hands of US Attorney John Durham. Because Washington is seldom keen to prosecute even plainly illegal leaks when Republicans are the victims, and because unprofessional credulousness in the face of dubious "intelligence" (like the Steele dossier) is not about to become a crime, the cathartic prosecutions of Obama intelligence officials that some Trump loyalists crave are unlikely to happen. 

Many of us avidly await the coming revelations for a different reason: to see if the mainstream media will finally interest itself in the truths of 2016.  Looming over the fourth estate is a quietly important question: whether continuing to collude in a coverup can remain consistent with commercial survival.

My reactions:


1) I don't doubt that the republic can survive a full airing of the intelligence community's actions in 2016--and, indeed, for the last 3-4 years, and probably more. The far bigger question is, whether the republic can survive without such a full airing. That appears to me to be doubtful.

2) Jenkin's characterization of the Intelligence Community's actions over the past years as "inept" is clearly absurd. Kevin Clinesmith's faking of evidence wasn't "inept", it was criminal. Nor was opening NSA databases to opposition research contractors for the DNC, concealing negative information from the FISC, refusing to look at Democrat collusion with Ukraine against Trump in 2016, merely "inept." And, of course, there's much more.

3) Whether the fourth estate can survive the latest massive revelations of their corruption and survive commercially is a question that has already been answered. If they survive it will only be in attenuated form and without the presumption of credibility they once enjoyed.

Another interesting aspect of Jenkins' article is that he skips from the "odor" of media corruption that was on full display in 1963 (as some of us recall) all the way to 2016. What happened to the Nixon years--and indeed all the years up to the present?

In fact, it's somewhat amusing, but also very telling, that a part of the Impeachment Theater effort to sell another leftist coup has involved efforts to revive the memory of "The Movement" from the Sixties and Seventies and, especially of Watergate. Not surprisingly it was none other than disgraced prosecutor Andrew Weissmann--late of Team Mueller and author of the Mueller Dossier--who turned up on MSNBC to tell the Dems how to sell impeachment:

"The key thing that the Democrats have to think about is, where are you going to be at the end? What is it that you’re going to be asking people to really care about? And you need to find out — and make the case for — why should there be impeachment where people vote to convict as opposed to acquit now, and not sort of let it go to the election?" Weissmann said on MSNBC. 

He said Democrats "needed to focus on that this was about election interference in our election" and encouraged more analogies to the Watergate scandal that led to President Richard Nixon's resignation.

We first saw the Nixon comparisons when Comey was fired--the media just can't seem to help themselves and comically believe the rest of the country is also always ready to relive the glory days of Watergate. The significance of this latest recrudescence (the mot juste, I believe) of the Watergate mythology was not lost on Geoff Shepard: Trump impeachment and Watergate – As a Nixon defense attorney I can compare them. (It's a fine article--read it all.) He notes the coordination of talking points:

Following the lackluster Trump impeachment hearings in the House Intelligence Committee, Mueller prosecutor Andrew “The Pit Bull” Weissmann took to cable news to coach Democrats on their performance. He urged them to go bigger and bolder with their argument by comparing President Trump’s conduct directly to President Richard Nixon’s in the Watergate scandal.

Days later, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., did just that by claiming: “What [Trump] did was so much worse than even what Richard Nixon did.”

Predictably the effort fell totally flat, which is in line with what Andrew Klavan tells us (follow the link to his fine article, too), quoted in a piece by Ed Driscoll:

ANDREW KLAVAN: ‘Watergate’ Doesn’t Mean What the Press Thinks It Means.

Recently, reading Mark Levin’s Unfreedom of the Press, I was reminded that, before reporters went on their great crusade against Richard Nixon, they had overlooked a whole lot of corruption in the Democrat presidents who preceded him. 

Levin tells how John F. Kennedy, with the knowledge of his brother and Attorney General Robert, nudged the IRS into auditing conservative groups. With Kennedy approval, the FBI was also employed to investigate those the administration disliked, including Martin Luther King Jr. Lyndon Baines Johnson would later increase the politically motivated auditing and spying. None of this was uncovered until later on. 

Ben Bradlee — the editor of the Washington Post, where Woodward and Bernstein broke the Watergate story — was well aware of his pal Kennedy’s misuse of the tax and investigative agencies. Not only did he not report it, he allowed himself and his paper to be manipulated by information JFK had wrongly obtained. 

This totally changes the Watergate narrative. Nixon’s dirty tricks and enemy lists may have been creepy and wrong, but the press exposure of these misdemeanors came after years of ignoring similar and worse malfeasance by Democrat administrations. 

That changes what Watergate means. That transforms it from a heroic crusade into a political hit job, Democrat hackery masquerading as nobility. The press turned a blind eye to the corruption of JFK and LBJ, then raced to overturn the election of a man they despised—despised in part because he battled the Communism many of them had espoused. 

What is it Karl Marx said: History repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce?

Read the whole thing. While the left launched Watergate to destroy Nixon, the discovery by the American people that It Didn’t Start With Watergate, as Victor Lasky accurately titled his 1977 book did much to make the distrust of government an “unexpectedly” bipartisan affair in the 1970s. Or as David Frum puts it in his 2000 book How We Got Here: The 70s The Decade That Brought You Modern Life — For Better Or Worse: 

Some blame Watergate for this abrupt collapse of trust in institutions, but not very convincingly. For one thing, the decline in trust begins to appear in the polls as early as 1966, almost a decade before the Watergate was known as anything more than a big hole in the ground alongside the Potomac River. For another, the nation had managed unconcernedly to shrug off Watergate-style events before. Somebody bugged Barry Goldwater’s apartment during the 1964 election without it triggering a national trauma. The Johnson administration tapped the phones of Nixon supporters in 1968, and again nothing happened. John F. Kennedy regaled reporters with intimate details from the tax returns of wealthy Republican donors, and none of the reporters saw anything amiss. FDR used the Federal Bureau of Investigation to spy on opponents of intervention into World War II—and his targets howled without result. If Watergate could so transform the nation’s sense of itself, why did those previous abuses, which were equally well known to the press, not do so? Americans did not lose their faith in institutions because of the Watergate scandal; Watergate became a scandal because Americans were losing faith in their institutions.

Which brings us back to Andrew Klavan’s article above, in which he writes, “History repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce … Like the Nixon takedown, the attacks on Trump come after years of turning a blind eye to the corruption of a Democrat. Obama’s IRS campaign against the Tea Party? His lies about Benghazi? His Fast and Furious fiasco? His shutdown of a massive drug investigation to appease Iran? No big deal. Obama was, as almost every mainstream outlet has declared, ‘scandal free.’”

Read the whole thing.