Category: Donald Trump

Republicans ‘Punch Back Twice as Hard’ With Ad Targeting CNN Elitists

Posted on

 

In 2009, when the Obama administration was trying to ram its agenda through Congress, White House chief of staff Jim Messina told nervous Democrats not to worry about criticism: “If you get hit, we will punch back twice as hard.” That line has since become a regular meme at Instapundit — Democrats can’t stand it when we “punch back” — and apparently the folks at GOP headquarters are paying attention:

The Republican National Committee (RNC) launched a new digital campaign ad and a fundraiser on Tuesday in response to CNN’s Don Lemon mocking Trump supporters during a segment on his show that went viral on Monday night. . . .
The segment featured Lemon, far-left op-ed writer Wajahat Ali, and anti-Trump establishment Republican Rick Wilson who mocked Trump supporters as being uneducated rednecks who could not read, spell, or use maps.
“CNN anchor Don Lemon, The New York Times’ Wajahat Ali and winless carnival barker and scam PAC artist Rick Wilson let everyday Americans know what the establishment thinks about them: President Trump’s supporters are just a bunch of illiterate idiots deserving of the elites’ smug derision,” RNC Spokesman Steve Guest told The Daily Wire in a statement. “In a matter of seconds, CNN summed up the elite left’s disdain for half of America.”
Guest added, “Reminder for voters: As Joe Biden, Michael Bloomberg, Elizabeth Warren, Pete Buttigieg and Bernie Sanders campaign across the South for your vote, Lemon, Ali, and Wilson just summarized what these candidates really think of you as they shake your hand and pose for selfies.”

 

(Hat-tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.) Meanwhile, the “let’s mock 62.9 million Republican voters as retards” gang took to Twitter to pose as victims — climb up on that cross, Rick! — and their pathetic crybaby routine even got retweeted by anti-American Rep. Ilhan Omar.

Evidently envious of the attention being showered on Rick Wilson, his bloated soulmate Tom “The Expert” Nichols had some thoughts to share.


 

Impeachment Circus Update

Posted on Comments

 

The Trial of the Century began Tuesday with the House Democrats arguing for subpoenas and whatnot, arguments that mainly rehashed the weeks of testimony in Adam Schiff’s House committee. Nothing new was learned, no “bombshells” were dropped, and I don’t think anyone who nodded off for a nap (as I did) missed much.

There is only so much tedium we can tolerate. Politics junkies and the D.C. press corps may enjoy The Trial of the Century, but the bottom line has not changed: Trump committed no high crimes or misdemeanors, and Mitch McConnell will bring this farce to conclusion with an acquittal.

What we are watching is the Democrats engaging in a performance staged to provide sound bites for their propagandists in the media. Like the phony “debate” staged on CNN last week, this cable-TV charade is simply part of the Democrats’ 2020 presidential campaign. Insofar as anything important happened Tuesday, Tyler O’Neill suggests it was in Jay Sekulow’s opening argument in defense of Trump:

During his opening remarks in the Senate impeachment trial, President Donald Trump’s lawyer Jay Sekulow quoted Democrats’ own words against them. He condemned the House Democrats’ rush to impeach Trump, adding an article of impeachment for “Obstruction of Congress” rather than litigating a matter of executive privilege in court. He quoted House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), and Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.), each of whom defended Barack Obama’s Attorney General Eric Holder when he was held in contempt of Congress in 2012.
“Mr. Schiff did say the courts don’t really have a role in this. Executive privilege? Why would that matter? It matters because it’s based in the Constitution of the United States,” Sekulow said. “The president’s opponents in their rush to impeach have refused to wait for judicial review.”

Speaking of Tyler O’Neill, he’s just published a book entitled Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which deserves widespread attention. Years ago, when I was smeared by the SPLC, few conservatives understood how dangerous and dishonest the SPLC had become, but as the scope of their smears widened — targeting traditional-values organizations like the Family Research Council as “hate groups” — public awareness of the SPLC’s malice began to spread. The problem is not that there are no genuinely dangerous hate-mongers out there, but rather that the SPLC’s political agenda (and their endless fundraising drives) required them to expand the definition of “hate group” until it meant simply: People who disagree with liberals.

If you think about it, that’s basically the Democrats’ argument for impeachment: Disagreeing with liberals is a crime, and Trump is guilty!



 

Trump Orders U.S. Air Strike That Kills Top Iranian Commander in Baghdad

Posted on Comments

 

Official statement from the Pentagon:

At the direction of the President, the U.S. military has taken decisive defensive action to protect U.S. personnel abroad by killing Qasem Soleimani, the head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps-Quds Force, a U.S.-designated Foreign Terrorist Organization.
General Soleimani was actively developing plans to attack American diplomats and service members in Iraq and throughout the region. General Soleimani and his Quds Force were responsible for the deaths of hundreds of American and coalition service members and the wounding of thousands more. He had orchestrated attacks on coalition bases in Iraq over the last several months – including the attack on December 27th – culminating in the death and wounding of additional American and Iraqi personnel. General Soleimani also approved the attacks on the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad that took place this week.
This strike was aimed at deterring future Iranian attack plans. The United States will continue to take all necessary action to protect our people and our interests wherever they are around the world.

Associated Press:

The United States killed Iran’s top general and the architect of Tehran’s proxy wars in the Middle East in an airstrike at Baghdad’s international airport early on Friday, an attack that threatens to dramatically ratchet up tensions in the region.
The targeted killing of Gen. Qassem Soleimani, the head of Iran’s elite Quds Force, could draw forceful Iranian retaliation against American interests in the region and spiral into a far larger conflict between the U.S. and Iran, endangering U.S. troops in Iraq, Syria and beyond. . . .
Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei warned that a “harsh retaliation is waiting” for the U.S.
Iranian state TV carried a statement by Khamenei also calling Soleimani “the international face of resistance.” Khamenei declared three days of public mourning for the general’s death.
Also, an adviser to Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani warned President Donald Trump of retaliation from Tehran. “Trump through his gamble has dragged the U.S. into the most dangerous situation in the region,” Hessameddin Ashena wrote on the social media app Telegram. “Whoever put his foot beyond the red line should be ready to face its consequences.”
Iranian state television later in a commentary called Trump’s order to kill Soleimani “the biggest miscalculation by the U.S.” in the years since World War II. “The people of the region will no longer allow Americans to stay,” the TV said.

Notice how the AP feels obligated to dwell on Iraq’s threats of retaliation. Meanwhile, anti-Trump neocon Matthew Continetti is happy:

The successful operation against Qassem Soleimani, head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard, is a stunning blow to international terrorism and a reassertion of American might. It will also test President Trump’s Iran strategy. It is now Trump, not Ayatollah Khamenei, who has ascended a rung on the ladder of escalation by killing the military architect of Iran’s Shiite empire. For years, Iran has set the rules. It was Iran that picked the time and place of confrontation. No more.
Reciprocity has been the key to understanding Donald Trump. Whether you are a media figure or a mullah, a prime minister or a pope, he will be good to you if you are good to him. Say something mean, though, or work against his interests, and he will respond in force. It won’t be pretty. It won’t be polite. There will be fallout. But you may think twice before crossing him again. . . .
The risk to the U.S. embassy—and the possibility of another Benghazi—must have angered Trump. “The game has changed,” Secretary of Defense Esper said hours before the assassination of Soleimani at Baghdad airport. Indeed, it has.

Indeed, indeed. I’m hesitant to predict what comes next. Thursday night, while I was trying to watch the Gator Bowl, “World War 3” was trending on Twitter, and yes, the worst-case scenario is Armageddon. We can’t pretend that the risk of all-out war is non-existent. However, the question is not Iran’s intent — they hate America and want us all dead — but rather Iran’s capacity to turn their intentions into action. We shall see.

UPDATE: The reaction of the left-wing media was predictable:

As news broke that President Trump had ordered a targeted strike in Iraq against Qasem Soleimani, the head of Iran’s Quds Forces, the liberal media where aghast Trump would take action against a killer of American troops and innocence. During the primetime pearl-clutching on MSNBC’s The Last Word, a panel of journalists and former Obama administration officials were busy suggesting there was no plan and “if” Soleimani deserved what he got, Trump was the “wrong” president to dish it out.

Hat-tip to Ed Driscoll at Instapundit, who links my post from 2013 when Rachel Maddow was demanding all-out war against Syria.



 

Trump Unites Republicans

Posted on Comments

 

In Wednesday night’s “historic” impeachment vote — the cable news people keep repeating that word, for some reason — not a single Republican member of the House voted “yea,” whereas there were three “nay” votes in Nancy Pelosi’s Democratic caucus: Minnesota Rep. Collin C. Peterson and New Jersey Rep. Jeff Van Drew voted against both articles of impeachment, while Maine Rep. Jared Golden voted for the “abuse of power” charge, but voted against charging President Trump with “obstruction of Congress.” Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, who is running for president as a Democrat, voted “present” on both articles.

What does this mean? It means Bill Kristol is once again proven wrong. Last month, the #NeverTrump ex-Fox News pundit claimed, on the basis of “private conversations,” that some Republicans in the House would vote in favor of impeaching the president. Oops.

 

What is the “evidence” about which Republicans “refuse to care”? Like Adam Schiff, Maxine Waters and CNN’s audience, Kristol apparently still believes Donald Trump is a Russian agent who “stole” the election, and where is the “evidence” to support that paranoid conspiracy theory? If Bill Kristol is ever right about something, let me know. He’s got a Harvard education and zero common sense, but I digress . . .

If Kristol was wrong about the House vote, certainly he must be dismayed by the prospects in the Senate, where it would take a two-thirds majority (at least 67 senators) to convict and remove the President from office. That’s in the Constitution, and in yesterday’s phony “debate” in the House, Democrats repeatedly claimed that impeaching the president was about defending the Constitution, which is an obvious lie. Democrats are against the Constitution — they are against freedom of speech, against freedom of religion, against the “right to keep and bear arms,” against the Electoral College, etc. Basically the entire Constitution is wrong, according to Democrats but . . . ORANGE MAN BAD!

 

Contrary to lectures by, inter alia, noted constitutional scholar Maxine Waters, the President’s authority to conduct diplomacy is practically unlimited and, whatever your opinion about U.S. policy toward Ukraine, there was nothing unconstitutional about Trump’s July request that the newly-elected Ukrainian president “do us a favor” by investigating the corrupt activities of Hunter Biden and Alexandra Chalupa. No Democrat ever wants to talk about what Chalupa was doing in 2016, just like they never want to talk about whether President Obama authorized the FBI’s illegal surveillance of Trump’s campaign. To those who have bought into the “Russian collusion” conspiracy theory, any discussion of these subjects is — you guessed it — Russian propaganda, so that Democrats (and Bill Kristol, but I repeat myself) are living inside an echo chamber where all “evidence” points to Moscow, including the evidence that points in the opposite direction. But once again, I digress . . .

Impeachment has united Republicans in support of Trump, and nowhere is this unity more solid than in the Senate, where Mitch McConnell seems determined that the Democrats’ bogus ginned-up charges against the president will get a fair (but brief) hearing before being dismissed with the contemptuous ridicule it so richly deserves. As might be expected, Nancy Pelosi is not happy about this:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said Democrats may wait to send their articles of impeachment against President Trump to the GOP-controlled Senate, for fear that they are incapable of holding a fair trial.
Pelosi held a press conference on Wednesday following the House impeachment vote and was asked what would qualify as a “fair trial.”
“We’ll make a decision as a group, as we always have, as we go along,” she replied.
Pelosi was then asked about possibly withholding the articles of impeachment from the Senate until they get certain reassurances, and the Speaker refused to give a direct answer.
“Again, we’ll decide what that dynamic is, but we hope that the resolution of that process will be soon in the Senate,” she said.
Pelosi proceeded to read a statement from Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., about impeachment procedure and used it as an example of what she considers to be an unfair process.
“Let me tell you what I don’t consider a fair trial,” she told the crowd of reporters. “This is what I don’t consider a fair trial — that Leader McConnell has stated that he’s not an impartial juror, that he’s going to take his cues, in quotes, from the White House, and he is working in total coordination with the White House counsel’s office.”

Folks, you couldn’t make this up. According to Nancy Pelosi, it is wrong for Republican senators to support a Republican president. This fits neatly into the general pattern of Pelosi’s San Francisco-based belief system, where it is simply wrong for anyone to vote Republican. Her district is 100% urban and the median income is $111,717; Hillary got 77% of the 2016 presidential vote in Pelosi’s district. By contrast, Mitch McConnell represents the Commonwealth of Kentucky with a rural population of 1.8 million (23%) and a median income of $48,375, where Trump got about 63% of the vote. There are more Democrat voters in McConnell’s state than there are Republican voters in Pelosi’s district, so that she can (and does) completely disregard Republican opinions. In her part of California, “Antifa” thugs routinely perpetrate political terrorism against Trump supporters, and Nancy Pelosi refuses to condemn this violent suppression of opposing voices. Pelosi does not recognize the legitimacy of Trump’s election because she considers all Republican voters to be evil. The 1.2 million Kentucky citizens who voted for Trump are wrong, and their votes should count for nothing compared to the 275,000 Californians who voted to elect Nancy Pelosi — such is the cult mentality behind this impeachment. Meanwhile, in Michigan:

President Donald Trump reacted live to the results of the impeachment vote in the House of Representatives on Wednesday, during an epic long two-hour rally with supporters in Michigan.
“They don’t even have any crime, this is the first impeachment where there’s no crime!” Trump said to the crowd of supporters at his campaign rally in Battle Creek, Michigan after learning that House Democrats had voted to impeach him.
Trump referred to the “very dark era” of history when President Richard Nixon was impeached and said it was remarkable that the feeling this time around was much different.
“I don’t know about you, but I’m having a good time, it’s crazy,” Trump said as the crowd of supporters cheered. . . .
Trump ridiculed Democrats for the partisan vote, even losing support from Americans despite their best efforts to make their case in a series of House hearings.
“I’m not worried. I’m not worried. Because it’s always good when you don’t do anything wrong, you get impeached,” Trump said. “That might be a record that will last forever.” . . .
“I know one thing, Americans will show up by the tens of millions next year to vote Nancy Pelosi the hell out of office,” Trump said as the crowd cheered wildly.
Trump spoke for two hours at the rally, highlighting the work he was doing to help rebuild states like Michigan with more jobs, stock market records, and better trade deals. He also spoke about reviving the auto industry, praising companies like Ford who recently announced a $1.45 billion investment in the state.

Oh, and here’s a little love-tap for the #NeverTrump gang:

Notably, the Trump rally was held inside the congressional district of U.S. Rep. Justin Amash, a former libertarian Republican who left the party over his opposition to Trump and was the only non-Democratic vote on the articles of impeachment.

Yeah, f–k you, Justin. Enjoy your upcoming retirement from office.



 

Impeachment Day Arrives

Posted on

Today the Democrats will vote to impeach President Trump for . . .

Uh, whatever. Ever since Trump was elected, Democrats promised they would impeach him if Nancy Pelosi ever got the Speaker’s gavel, and today they will keep that promise. The pretext for this was a “whistleblower” — a Democrat holdover on the National Security Council staff — who went running to Adam Schiff with a wild tale about Trump’s July phone call to the newly elected president of Ukraine. All questions about that phone call were answered by Trump through the simple expedient of releasing the transcript. But having worked themselves into an impeachment frenzy over this, Democrats refused to acknowledge that Trump had beat them, and continued stumbling onward.

Yesterday, Trump gave them the back of his hand:

President Trump, in a blistering, no-holds-barred six-page letter Tuesday to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., lambasted the Democrats’ impeachment inquiry as an “open war on American Democracy,” writing that she has violated her oath of office and “cheapened the importance of the very ugly word, impeachment!”
“Everyone, you included, knows what is really happening,” Trump said, just a day before House Democrats were expected to vote to impeach him. “Your chosen candidate lost the election in 2016, in an Electoral College landslide (306-227), and you and your party have never recovered from this defeat. So you have spent three straight years attempting to overturn the will of the American people and nullify their votes. You view democracy as your enemy!”
He went on: “You are the ones interfering in America’s elections. You are the ones subverting America’s Democracy. You are the ones Obstructing Justice. You are the ones bringing pain and suffering to our Republic for your own selfish personal, political, and partisan gain.”

Did you know that, in its origins in English law, an official who was impeached was usually punished by execution, then drawn and quartered? Impeachment was intended by our Founders to be a remedy of last resort, and by requiring a two-thirds majority to convict in the Senate, the Constitution discourages any such proceeding on trivial grounds or disputed charges. People who think the 1998 impeachment of President Clinton was “just about sex” have not studied the case adequately. President Clinton perjured himself while giving testimony in a federal civil-rights lawsuit brought by Paula Jones, and furthermore obstructed justice by his efforts to prevent Jones’s lawyers from learning the truth about Monica Lewinsky (which was relevant as evidence to Jones’s suit). You may believe, as I do, that the legal precedents in regard to “sexual harassment” long ago went too far, but nevertheless, the law is the law, and Bill Clinton could have settled that lawsuit out of court, but refused. Paula Jones had a right to truthful testimony in her lawsuit, and Clinton illegally deprived her of that right. When the Drudge Report first broke the story of Monica Lewinsky, everyone — and I mean everyone, Democrats included — said that if the story was true, Clinton would have to resign. Instead, as both Dick Morris and Sidney Blumenthal have said, Bill and Hillary Clinton’s response was: “We’ll just have to win.”

So anyone invoking the 1998 impeachment to justify what Democrats are doing now must ignore the obvious objections: If Clinton had settled that lawsuit — and who now doubts Paula Jones was telling the truth? — there would have been no impeachment. If, when the Lewinsky scandal broke, Clinton had resigned, there would have been no impeachment. The reason there was an impeachment was because there was clear and unrefuted evidence (DNA on Monica Lewinsky’s blue dress) that Clinton had perjured himself, and substantial evidence to show obstruction of justice in a federal civil-rights lawsuit. But I digress . . .

What is the substance of Democrats’ case against Trump now? It is simply a dispute over his exercise of diplomacy with Ukraine — a matter of foreign policy, related to corruption that occurred during Obama’s presidency, which is in turn related to the “Russian collusion” hoax that Trump’s enemies perpetrated against him for two years. Now, you may dislike the methods by which Trump endeavored to get the results he wanted in Ukraine, but the idea that this was “a threat to our democracy” (as Democrats keep saying) is ludicrous. They cannot claim Trump obstructed justice, because there was no underlying crime to conceal, besides which Trump released the phone transcript as soon as Schiff and the Democrats tried to make a “scandal” of that July phone call. How is that “obstructing” anything? Because there is no actual crime involved, Democrats have instead made “abuse of power” the central claim of their impeachment, as if the actual “abuse” (i.e., Joe Biden demanding the termination of a Ukrainian investigator who was looking into Hunter Biden’s shady Burisma deal) did not occur on Obama’s watch.

In essence, Democrats are proving the truth of what Trump says in his letter: They never accepted the legitimacy of his victory in 2016, so they “have spent three straight years attempting to overturn the will of the American people and nullify their votes.” This is self-evident, and there is a reason why polls show that support for impeachment has been declined even among Democrat voters, over the past two months.

Democrats have chosen poorly, and we can hope they will soon regret it.



 

Impeachment Circus Update

Posted on

 

How is it “news” that Democrats are impeaching President Trump, when this outcome was determined in advance? Recall that California Rep. Maxine Waters has been leading chants of “Impeach 45!” since 2017. As soon as Democrats won a majority in Congress, impeachment was foreordained. This is what Democrats voted for, and Nancy Pelosi had no choice but to deliver it; anyone who opposes impeachment is racist.

 

Consider this: When the House Democrats announced their articles of impeachment last week, the members making the announcement included three representatives from California (Pelosi, Waters and Adam Schiff), three from New York (Eliot Engel, Jerrold Nadler and Carolyn Maloney) and one from Massachusetts, Richard Neal. The Democratic Party leadership, in other words, represents the coastal fringe of the country, and they are attempting to undo the results of a presidential election in which Republicans won the country’s heartland.

Everything else about this story is mere details, and it seems that the American people are as bored with the details as I am:

Support for impeaching Trump and removing him from office stands at 45% in the new poll, down from 50% in a poll conducted in mid-November just after the conclusion of the House Intelligence Committee’s public hearings. Opposition to impeachment and removal stands at 47% in the new poll, up from 43% in November. Support for impeachment and removal among Democrats has dipped from 90% in November to 77% now.

You see that (quite predictably) the actual process of impeachment has proven less popular than simply shouting the slogan, “Impeach 45!”

The media, acting as propagandists and publicity agents of the Democratic Party, are attempting to rescue their pet project from failure. The media represent the same New York/California/Massachusetts interests, but seek to conceal this by manufacturing a semblance of bipartisan “mainstream” support for the impeachment circus.

McSally ‘hasn’t been convinced’
Trump should be impeached

What is this story about? The Associated Press is acting as partisan organization to pressure a Republican Senator on impeachment:

Republican Sen. Martha McSally has not been convinced that President Donald Trump should be removed from office, her campaign manager said Monday after a recording surfaced of her suggesting to GOP activists that the president hadn’t abused his power.
“Senator McSally takes her role as a juror seriously but hasn’t heard anything so far that would lead her to believe impeachment of the president is warranted, let alone removing him from office,” campaign manager Dylan Lefler said in a statement to The Associated Press.
Lefler released the statement after the AP obtained a recording of the Arizona senator telling GOP activists over the weekend that she doesn’t believe Trump abused his power, ending months of silence from McSally about whether she was troubled by the president’s actions.
McSally, who’s one of the most vulnerable Republicans in the U.S. Senate, has repeatedly avoided saying whether she thinks it was wrong for Trump to ask Ukraine’s government to investigate his political rival.
But she was much more candid when speaking to a supportive audience in Tucson on Saturday, saying only the Democrats have abused their power.
She said Republicans want to “make sure that we continue to highlight the abuse of power” that Democrats have committed, “which is the only abuse of power that we’ve seen going on here,” apparently referring to the impeachment inquiry.

What does it mean to say McSally is “vulnerable”?

She was appointed to the late John McCain’s seat after she lost the 2018 election for Arizona’s other Senate seat to Democrat Kyrsten Sinema. With an abundance of suburbs, where Trump has lost support among women, Arizona is becoming increasingly competitive for Democrats.

In other words, McSally is up for re-election next November, and the AP’s “journalists” are trying to help Democrats defeat her. You see that this media pressure campaign takes the form of demanding that McSally address the details of the phony “UkraineGate” scandal. Democrats have been unable to locate any actual “high crimes or misdemeanors” in President Trump’s actions — the Constitution grants the president nearly unlimited authority to conduct diplomacy, an area of activity that certainly includes his July phone call with Ukraine’s president — so instead they will endlessly rehearse their “abuse of power” claims.

According to the Democrat/media narrative, the only reason Trump wanted Ukraine to investigate corruption (e.g., Hunter Biden’s lucrative appointment to the board of Burisma) was in order to “steal” the 2020 election by damaging his rival, Joe Biden. While it is far from certain (and was doubtful at the time of the July phone call) that Biden will be the Democratic nominee in 2020, how could it be wrong — let alone “high crimes and misdemeanors” — to wish to obtain the facts? What Democrats seem to be arguing is that any effort to learn the truth about Hunter Biden and Burisma (or about Alexandra Chalupa’s Ukrainian influence operation in the 2016 campaign) is an impeachable offense.

There are questions we aren’t allowed to ask, and answers we aren’t allowed to know — this is the essence of the Democrats’ case against Trump. Everything else is mere details, and as the reality of this impeachment circus becomes apparent to anyone with the intelligence necessary to discern what’s really happening, only the most delirious victims of Trump Derangment Syndrome can take it seriously.



 

Yes, Operation Crossfire Hurricane Was Wrong and Corrupt From the Start

Posted on Comments

The pretext the FBI used to spied on the Trump campaign was fraudulent — that’s the bottom line of the report Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz delivered this week. Among other things, the IG’s report vindicated Republican Rep. Devin Nunes, who in February 2018 issued a memo detailing the many abuses involved in the FBI’s investigation of “Russian collusion.” After the Mueller report and now the IG report, we can say with certainty that (a) “collusion” was a paranoid fantasy manufactured by Trump’s enemies, and (b) the FBI’s reliance on Fusion GPS and the so-called “Steele dossier” was, at the very least, a mistake. At worst, it was a deliberate deceit, and I’m not in a mood to give the FBI the benefit of the doubt. Ed Morrissey at Hot Air finds the Washington Post‘s Aaron Blake attempting to spin the IG’s findings as favorably as possible to the FBI, and failing:

The point, however, is that the FBI misrepresented [information about Steele’s leaking to the media] to the court in order to protect its surveillance warrant on Page. These are a series of corrupt acts that go to the heart of whether Operation Crossfire Hurricane was a corrupt investigation. That is precisely the issue about which Nunes warned in his memo, and the Horowitz report corroborates each of the factual claims Nunes made in that warning.
It certainly looks as though Nunes can claim a very large amount of vindication. The media, on the other hand, should be asking itself why it found Schiff so credible in his defense of secret surveillance of a US citizen by counterintelligence operations on the basis of a discredited oppo research file. Is it that they just preferred Schiff’s anti-Trump narrative above all other considerations?

Yes, that’s exactly what it was — the anti-Trump media has always been willing to believe the worst about Trump, and thus were culpable in helping to manufacture the “Russian collusion” myth, which they then sought to defend against all critics. Aaron Blake still doesn’t want to admit this, because it proves the Washington Post is “fake news.”



 

Impeachment Circus Update

Posted on Comments

 

Readers will excuse my paucity of commentary about this week’s “historic” impeachment news — CNN keeps repeating the word “historic,” as if we were watching the crash of the Hindenburg in real time — but I was busy destroying the feminist blogosphere. You’re welcome.

Anyway, on Monday the Democrats held a hearing in which their chief witness was a lawyer who, after he finished testifying, got up on the other side to serve as the interrogator of the Republicans’ chief witness.

It was like the Moscow Show Trials re-done as a Monty Python skit.

When Democrats are making a mockery of due process this way, can you blame me if I fail to provide running commentary? What can I do except point and laugh? Everybody with two eyes and a brain understands that this isn’t about President Trump’s “high crimes and misdemeanors,” it’s about ORANGE MAN BAD! We’re witnessing the symptoms of terminal Trump Derangement Syndrome, not an actual impeachment, and it’s very difficult for me to treat this ludicrous charade seriously.

What I didn’t realize Monday morning, however, was that the Democrats had scheduled that hearing on short notice as a means to try to hijack the news cycle on the day that Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz released his devastating report on the FBI’s malfeasance in its surveillance of the Trump 2016 campaign. So this impeachment business is actually a cover-up — Adam Schiff and his cronies are using this process to smear Trump and distract Americans from evidence of wrongdoing that occurred in Obama’s administration.

The so-called “mainstream” media is tangled up in all this, as Molly Hemingway explained Tuesday on Fox News Special Report:

I’m one of the few people who has actually read the 430-page report. It outlines such tremendous amounts of spying. Electronic surveillance, the use of confidential human informants that were replaced people on the campaign.
Two years ago you had competing memos come out. You had Devin Nunes say that there were problems with the FISA process, that that was abuse. You had the response memo from Adam Schiff who is now leading the impeachment effort. Never Trump media and liberal media completely disparage the Nunes memo and completely supported the Schiff memo and they were utterly humiliated by what come out in this report yesterday. Every single thing in the Nunes memo reported to be true. If anything, it underreported the problems with the FISA process.
Meanwhile, things that were claimed by Schiff that people took seriously, the people accepted uncritically, were shown to be false. They said there were no material omissions in the FISA warrants. . . .
There were so many errors. And, again, all in the same direction. The dossier was completely disputed. Remember that Adam Schiff read the dossier into the Congressional record. He hijacked a separate hearing in order to do so. There should be consequences for this. And there should be consequences for media that got it wrong as well.

Do you see why it seems to me futile to comment on every new development here? When all is said and done, the daily events of this circus will be just so many details that no one really cares about, because the Democrats (and the news media, but I repeat myself) as so obviously in the wrong that nothing I say about it could possibly matter.

Here’s the thing though: If Nancy Pelosi understands nothing else, she certainly knows how to conduct a whip count. In other words, she has enough Democrat members demanding impeachment in order to get the 218 votes necessary, and if she tried to stop it, the demented Trump-haters in her caucus would destroy her. Pelosi has no choice now but to pretend that this is legitimate, regardless of what the polls might say, and the polls aren’t very encouraging for Democrats. They have lashed themselves to the mast, and will go down with the ship.