Dems Are So 1960s

I've had this post--empty but for the title--sitting in my drafts for at least a week, probably longer. I ended up using the material I was gathering--about Nixon and Watergate--in Turning Over The 2016 Rocks. But just now I was reading Don Surber who quoted Glenn Reynolds' latest: Dems shouldn't be surprised when another election passes them by.

In the course of the article Reynolds makes this observation about "the army of leftist activists whose nonstop craziness is moving moderates into the Trump column day by day":

Like I said, it's fantasy role-play, in this case by people sad that they were born too late for the 1960s. ...

I could go on and on, but pretty much any random day's survey of the news makes my point.

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:

Watergate v. The Russia Hoax

Commenter Joe raised the issue recently of how to deal with the Russia Hoax if it leads, as seems inevitable now, to the Obama White House. In doing so, while avoiding the word itself, he referred in passing to the ultimate evil in Liberal mythology--Watergate: Eeeeek!

We have a history of not indicting presidents, à la the Ford pardon of Richard Nixon. Is it a realistic possibility that charges are brought against Obama and Clinton, with a Trump pardon predicated on an admission of guilt and possible payments of large fines? Thinking of Clinton for all the dirty Clinton Foundation pay-to-play scheme.

In response I noted that Nixon, IMO rightly, never made that admission of guilt. Further, in my mind the Russia Hoax is different in kind as well as degree from Watergate. George Parry, a former prosecutor, expresses the stakes as well as the distinction well in a recent article:

"The Watergate burglary was a bungled attempt by the Committee to Re-Elect President Nixon to break into Democrat headquarters to plant listening devices in the telephones. The burglary failed, but the national outrage at the mere attempt drove Nixon from office and sent members of his administration to prison. As bad as that was, at least the Nixon campaign didn’t corrupt the FBI and CIA to do its dirty work. So it is that, if our official law enforcement and intelligence agencies were co-opted by the Obama administration to illegally spy on American citizens and the opposition party, this will be the worst governmental scandal and threat to our civil liberties in the history of the nation.

"If Joe diGenova is right, the very survival of the rule of law and our constitutional republic mandates that these treasonous thugs — no matter how highly placed in the Obama administration — be exposed, charged, and imprisoned."

I think Parry and DiGenova have it exactly right. What we're faced with is a conspiracy against our constitutional order. It may not satisfy the requirement of force and violence to constitute a seditious conspiracy, but in its intent (and its methodical abuse of our legal system) it represents absolutely as much of a threat as any violent conspiracy to the rule of law and our constitutional republic. And let it not be forgotten that this conspiracy was undertaken and carried out in collaboration with foreign powers. A conspiracy against our constitutional order in collaboration with foreign powers. There. I said it again.

The ball is in Bill Barr's court.

Draining The Swamp

This morning Scott Johnson at Powerline linked to a review of Unmasking the Administrative State: The Crisis of American Politics in the Twenty-First Century, by John Marini. The review is by Michael Anton, Draining the Swamp:

Michael Anton (born 1970) is an American former senior national security official in the Trump administration. He is best known for his pseudonymous essays written during the 2016 presidential campaign in which he supported Donald Trump and collaborated on the pro-Trump Journal of American Greatness blog. Anton was named Deputy Assistant to the President for Strategic Communications on the United States National Security Council. [Read More]

It's a long review, and one that may begin a bit slowly for those who aren't up on political philosophy, but it's hard to praise it enough for the insights into, well, The Crisis of American Politics in the Twenty-First Century. In other words, the big picture of what the Russia Hoax is really all about and how it relates to American history--and America's future. I highly recommend Anton's review for its portrayal of the Russia Hoax and the monumental effort by the Deep State to reject Trump like an invasive foreign body. In particular, his application of Marini's thinking to a comparison between Nixon/Watergate and Trump/Russia Hoax is fascinating. Do yourself a favor and read the whole thing. Here are some snippets: