Saturday, February 17, 2018

The Collusion Narrative Collapses


As everyone expected, the Russian collusion narrative definitively collapsed yesterday. When the Justice Department indicted thirteen Russian trolls and three Russian companies for attempting to influence the presidential election it added that no Americans had been part of the plot. We had already had it on excellent authority that collusion is not a crime, but no one much cared about that.

Democrats who cannot accept that they lost to Donald Trump have been trying to undo the election results in the name of… you guessed it… democracy. They have been on television baying at the moon, accusing Trump of treason, mass murder, dementia and bad sex… all of which are supposed to be grounds for impeachment… or worse. 

You recall the mini-frenzy over Trump’s health, both mental and physical. You recall that the dementia narrative collapsed when Trump’s physician spend an hour answering idiotic questions from reporters who knew nothing of medicine. Anyway, it ended the dementia narrative. Puff… up in smoke.

Time to move on to another narrative, another way to undermine and delegitimize a president who won a fair election. All in the name of democracy… which depends, in very large part, on the ability to accept when one had has lost and to extend a gracious hand to the winner. Who’s undermining democracy now?

Anyway, the Wall Street Journal editorializes this morning that we ought perhaps not throw ourselves into the highest dudgeon over yet another media machine doing opposition research and trying to influence hearts and minds. Compared to the Republican and Democrat influence machines, to say nothing of the mainstream media, this Russian trolls were small change:

The indictment also contains no evidence that Russia’s meddling changed the electoral results. A U.S. presidential campaign is a maelstrom of information, charges and counter-charges, media reports and social-media chatter. The Russian Twitter bursts became part of this din and sought to reinforce existing biases more than they sought to change minds. Their Twitter hashtags included “#Hillary4Prison,” for example, which you could find at the souvenir desk at the GOP convention.

Of course, while this was all happening, the man in charge was Barack Obama. It is  useful to remind ourselves of this, being as the hatred of Donald Trump, hatred that is positively dripping off the lips of his media detractors, is really an expression of mad love for Obama… the Messiah, sent by God to save America, the man who could do no wrong. It counts as one of the greatest cover-ups in American history, this effort to excuse all of Obama’s errors:

The indictment also makes us wonder what the Obama Administration was doing amid all of this. Where were top Obama spooks James Clapper and John Brennan ? Their outrage became public only after their candidate lost the election. If they didn’t know what was going on, why not? And if they did, why didn’t they let Americans in on the secret? President Obama sanctioned Russia for its meddling only after the election.

Fair enough, the Journal explains that we need to hear more from the White House:

All of which makes the White House reaction on Friday strangely muted. Its statement understandably focused on the lack of collusion evidence and made one reference to “the agendas of bad actors, like Russia.” But given how much Russia’s meddling has damaged his first year in office, Mr. Trump should publicly declare his outrage at Russia on behalf of the American people. The Kremlin has weakened his Presidency. He should make Russia pay a price that Mr. Obama never did.

As for those who are cheering the Mueller exoneration of Trump, we should all keep in mind that the investigation is not over and that, for all we know, the next round will not be so favorable to the president.

3 comments:

James said...


"As for those who are cheering the Mueller exoneration of Trump, we should all keep in mind that the investigation is not over and that, for all we know, the next round will not be so favorable to the president." Good Warning Stuart. Tomorrow always has it's say.

I for one want the investigation to continue, it has been wonderful.

Ignatius Acton Chesterton OCD said...

Mueller’s outline of Russian “meddling” is small potatoes, and clearly had no impact on the election. The Soviets did this for decades, and we never had a Special Counsel to hand down 11 flimsy indictments of basement-dwelling typists in Leningrad. If the Russians did anything, it was conduct an information warfare operation (a psy-op), not a hack or cyberattack. Mueller has nothing, and it is no accident this was announced the day after Parkdale, where the FBI really blew it. Mueller’s modus operandi is to protect his beloved FBI. He’s a man on a mission to find something, anything to damage a duly-elected president.

The real scandal is continuing to reveal itself, and there is much more to come. It is becoming apparent to anyone who can think clearly that President Obama weaponized the most powerful, intrusive government agencies — IRS, DOJ, FBI — on American citizens, including the presidential candidate of the principal opposition party. The operations and operators are looking more sinister by the day. Clapper and Brennan are unusually silent. Susan Rice and Samantha Power unmasked opponents to aid the Clinton campaign. Loretta Lynch held a clandestine rendezvous with former President Clinton to pass along the message that Hillary was in the clear. FBI Director James Comey serially made an ass out of himself. Everyone knows why Hillary Clinton was running an unsecured personal email server while she was Secretary of State: to conduct backchannel political communications with other politicos, including President Obama. Whatever you think of them, Bradley Manning, Edward Snowden, Julian Asange and Glenn Greenwald, what they’ve pointed out what is now painfully obvious: metadata and electronic surveillance is conducted on American citizens, with impunity. Obama executive branch figures, political operatives and third-party contractors were collecting information on political enemies to benefit President Obama, the Democrat Party agenda, and their own financial aggrandizement.

Rod Rosenstein has provided Robert Mueller a commission with no boundaries. It is a continuation of the FBI “insurance policy” to find something on President Trump. This is the Democrat-controlled Deep State in action, trying desperately to stop President Trump’s agenda. Why? Because D.C. is where the elite meet and determine what’s best for America. Yet America fought back and did the improbable: elected a man who the media freak out about daily. It is all laughably transparent. The only people not getting the joke are our omniscient, Ivy League-educated betters in Washington. Their groupthink is their undoing. In the end, you cannot rule over a country you’ve never been to, and you cannot fully understand an enemy you hold in contempt. We’re winning.

In the meantime, the cover for this investigation is fulfilled. Former FBI Director and Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III has indicted 11 people who were able to effectively take control of our democracy... from St. Petersburg, Russia. And they were able to continue to create problems for us after the election. We spend billions of dollars on an alphabet soup of intelligence agencies to stop the bad guys. For all that expense and intrusive surveillance power, we’ve since come to find out that the Russians were able to do great damage to our precious democracy (to say nothing of the Chinese and North Koreans). Wow, what a return on investment! We’re told the FBI couldn’t follow-up on a clear tip to stop a crazy Florida kid we’re told cavorts with dangerous white supremacist elements. So we spend effort, expense and unending media coverage to find out how Hillary Clinton got cheated out of what was hers, while 17 Parkdale people are dead because a well-known psychotic followed through on his clear threats.

Wow. Thank God we got those 11 Russian bad guys.

Ignatius Acton Chesterton OCD said...

Look at what is being done by Mueller. Look at what was done by Obama Administration officials in the DOJ and FBI. Look at what they are doing before the election, after the election, and right up to today. They’re overtly trying to shape or overturn the results a democratic election.

The reason they did and are doing all this is because they think Donald Trump is unfit to be president, and they’re going to look and look and look until they find something they can use to convince you of that... by any means necessary.

In the midst of all this, a lot of Congressional Republicans got spooked, and it halted the Trump-Republican legislative agenda — repeal ObamaCare, build a wall on the Mexican border, comprehensive tax reform — which was incredibly straightforward and popular, and would’ve been easy to execute. Instead of getting those wins, we’re treated to never-ending “news” about Russia, Russia, Russia.

All of this madness is based on the Steele dossier, which was a paid opposition research fiction commissioned by the Clinton campaign, and ultimately used to secure a FISA warrant (renewed 3 times) for the highest-level of surveillance on a minor Trump campaign volunteer. The warrant enabled a DOJ and FBI counterintelligence operation to conduct peripheral surveillance of the entire Trump campaign, including Trump himself. The status of the counterintelligence operation was shared in the President’s Daily Brief, which we’ve since learned was circulated amongst 40 people at the highest levels of the Obama Administration. And those players (especially Rice and Power) used data searches to unmask top Trump players ensnared under peripheral surveillance. After all, according to Rice’s last day CYA email, Obama wanted everything “by the book.”

Regardless of what you think about Trump, THAT is a big deal. We should be deeply troubled by that.

Who runs this country?