Saturday, February 3, 2018

The Rhetoric Surrounding the Nunes Memo

The Democratic Party and the American left seems to have run out of hyperbole. After declaring Donald Trump to be Hitler, or worse than Hitler or the Devil Incarnate… what’s left. After running around saying that a tax reform bill represents nothing less than Armageddon… what’s left. Before you know it they will be claiming that the sky is falling.

You can see the problem that Congressional Democrats and their media enablers had when anticipating the release of the Nunes memo. They had to fight the good rhetorical fight by saying that it was the worst thing that had happened to the Republic since… you fill in the blank.

So, they fell back on national security. The memo was going to damage national security by exposing how the FBI and the Justice Department do their work. One cannot fail to note the irony: a political party that has been inveighing against nationalism for months now, that is triggered by any appeal to patriotism… is now ready to man the battlements over national security.

Cognitive dissonance, anyone ….

These masters of rhetorical hyperbole, America’s best and brightest, seem to have contradicted themselves. Never mind. In truth, those American citizens who are the least educated vote Democratic all the time, no matter what.

One suspects that these pillars of judicial probity are horrified at being exposed… at the loss of their reputation, the loss of their image as intrepid fighters for truth and justice. It turns out that once you pull back the curtain, the Wizard of Oz is a far less formidable power than you thought. Surely they are far more concerned with maintaining their reputations than they are with anything so retrograde as national security. Behind the scenes, they act like partisan political hacks... but don't let that bother you. It's all for justice, or better, Justice. In their great minds that would be manipulating democratic elections to have their preferred candidate elected... and then screaming to the rafters about how the election must have been rigged... because how else could they possibly have failed to get their candidate elected.

For some salient commentary on the cognitive dissonance, take a gander at Jonathan Turley’s commentary on Tucker Carlson last night.


13 comments:

James said...

What a lot of people are not saying but I believe is true is that memo exposes possible problems with the FISA courts themselves. It's time to do a thorough investigation of FISA itself. The Left just keeps digging the hole deeper.

Redacted said...

The Doge's Palace in Venice has exterior slots where individuals could surreptitiously deposit "Denonte Segrete", or "secret denunciations", of fellow Venetians and city residents to the Venetian government. The Doge could then take [ahem] "appropriate legal action" as specified in the Promissione Maleficorum. As described in the Journal of Law and Criminology, "'Innocent until proven guilty' was too limiting a distinction to apply to Venice's fluid jurisprudence."

Democrats, apparently, thought these slots were a Good Idea. Progress, in a word. The DoJ, collecting deposits from the DNC and the Clinton campaign, provided Denonte Segrete to the FISA Courts. The Obama campaign even built a website, Attack Watch, intended to provide the Progressive faithful with an digital version of the Denonte Segrete slots.

Rather than sending a tragically scatty Nancy Pelosi out to chew her tongue and "explain" why secret denunciations are vital to Nashnull Segurity, Progs should adopt the defense mechanism of the Mighty Pillbug (aka the mild-mannered and ever-loquacious AO).

James said...

Also I think it's notable that of Obama, Biden, Lynch, Holder, Clapper, and Brennan we have very little to nothing in the last month or so.

Sam L. said...

This reflects badly/shines a YUUUUUUUUUUUUGE light on dirty Democrat dealings by the Obama administration. I await AO's refutation.

Ignatius Acton Chesterton OCD said...

This all traces back to the unmasking.

If someone in Trump’s circle (Carter Page) is under surveillance, then those around him are also under surveillance if senior officials are doing unethical/illegal queries for unredacted surveillance.

The Obama Administration had 40 people seeing the President’s Daily Brief (PDB), an extraordinary number. If they conducted surveillance queries and unmasked the people around Carter Page, then it was effectively a spy operation on the Trump campaign, and then it continued during the transition until NSA Director Admiral Mike Rogers went to Trump Tower and likely told Trump about this, since the whole Trump transition team moved out of Trump Tower the next day.

This was all put into motion by a FISA warrant obtained based on a fiction created, funded and promoted by Democrat operatives.

That, my friends, is a monumental scandal.

This abuse of power is extremely disturbing, and it is part of a larger story — Obama’s weaponizing the most intrusive Federal agencies: IRS, FBI, DOJ, etc.

And the media reaction is predictably phony. If this had happened with Republicans doing these things, we’d be looking at 24/7 crisis coverage and talk of fast-track impeachment. Instead, “respectable journalists” like Wolf Blitzer are still talking about the Russians.

And when you consider that these rumors and this “investigation” had a lot of Republican Congressional leaders spooked for a long time, you realize that Trump lost most of his first year with a Republican Congress to speculation based on a gigantic, sprawling fraud. This phony Steele narrative cost Trump his agenda. Perhaps that was the plan all along. It was a psy-op. The political damage was actually catastrophic, perhaps by design. Maybe this was the “insurance policy” FBI Special Agent Peter Strzok alluded to.

It’s not just FISA. It’s not just the DOJ/FBI. It’s not just the media. It’s evidence of a deeply ingrained groupthink in Washington, D.C. And the way these politicians and bureaucratic interests have gotten away with it is to subvert the law and create an unaccountable “Fourth Branch” of government in the DOJ. Taking the blindfold off of Lady Justice, and using legal machinations and perverting law enforcement procedures to achieve a bureaucracy-driven outcome under allegiance to the vaunted “rule of law.” Their goal was to influence a presidential election, then try to overturn it, and then try to neutralize it. This is an out-of-control bureaucracy that is above the law, yet is responsible for enforcing the law. Not as the sheepdog, but the wolf. And the fact that they thought they could do this in concert, so brazenly, tells me that they didn’t have anything to fear from their superiors, colleagues or subordinates. Again, groupthink and group action.

On top of that, you have Sessions recusing himself in the Russia proble, with Rod Rosenstein advising him to do just that... for posterity. Then Rosenstein gives Mueller a boundaryless special counsel mission to find... something. Then we find Rosenstein showing up in the Nunes memo, with ties to all this stuff with FISA.

This is a tangled web. Most of us recognize that we had key professional mentors early in our career. Ever wonder who Rod Rosenstein’s mentor was as a newbie prosecutor? It was Robert Mueller. Where did Mueller go on to do his most notable work? As long-time a Director of the FBI. And who oversees the FBI? The DOJ. And who oversees the DOJ? The Attorney General. And who oversees the Attorney General? The President of the United States.

Follow the unmasking. Because it is in unmasking that the raw surveillance becomes actionable intelligence against one’s domestic political enemies. And with all that raw material floating around in the “top-top-top-secret” PDB, that’s how you conduct an orchestra of ideologically-committed bureaucrats. Quietly. Because everyone is aligned, and everyone knows what is expected of them.

Nope, nothing to look at here. Big nothingburger.

James said...

IAC,
I think the Left will (if not now) end up regretting this set up. They are on the defensive, press them.

Sam L. said...

The media reaction was phony, because, as the Instapundit himself says, repeatedly, "It's easier to understand when you think of the media as Democrat operatives with bylines."

Ignatius Acton Chesterton OCD said...

I believe the biggest loser this past year has been the news media... by far. It’s not even a contest. They look like hysterical, blithering idiots. They don’t do their job. They are showmen and cabaret singers. They have no dignity left.

Ignatius Acton Chesterton OCD said...

It is now clear that the Democrats coordinate all their dirty tricks through law firms (Perkins-Coie —> Fusion GPS). Why? So they can claim attorney-client privilege later, just in case anyone connects the dots.

The Leftist media are shills for Democrats. This is how the swamp works. The comrade ideologues have each other’s backs. Always.

This kind of stuff was all going on back in 2012:
https://idahoconservatives.com/national/fisa-memo-obama-fusion-gps/

Obama becomes more sinister by the day. The fish rots from the head. The Democrat machine is using government agencies and legal processes/privileges/customs as a tool for thuggish political ends. The sacred “rule of law” is their shield.

This is racketeering.

James said...

IAC,
I think you're right. The Left is losing. The media was one of if not the biggest base of power they had and as you say it's been exposed and neutralized. Their connections are being exposed, they cannot have foreseen this nor do I believe could they have planned for this, they are on the defensive. They must be pressed.

Ares Olympus said...

What's funny about all of this, is if the situation were completely reversed, if Clinton was president under a Democratic congress, and she was being investigated for collusion with Russia or whatever, and a democratic committee wanted to release a memo written by staffers that cherry picked evidence that investigations against a Democrat that claimed the evidence used against him was biased by partisanship...

...everything we see reverses, and all the argument used by Democrat are then used by Republicans, an vice versa. Republicans would be defending the integrity of the FBI and the Democrats would be claiming a witch hunt.

The moral of the story is partisanship makes everyone stupid.

And I really don't see how this ever ends. With partisan media taking over, everyone stands ever deeper in their own echo chamber. And even if Trump ends up impeached by his own party, nothing really changes. The right can safely turn against Trump once the evidence accumulates, and if things turn fast enough, they can look like heroes, and win a landslide in Fall 2018 over hapless Democrats who can't find a message that beats Bill Clinton's own "It's the economy stupid". And it would be a fair reversal since Bill's own success was created by stealing all the republican ideas.

But at least we all have bipartisan support for trillion dollar deficits to stimulate job creators. Even Hillary would be rooting as hard for the billionaires, and it all looks good until it doesn't.

Ignatius Acton Chesterton OCD said...

James,

Check this one out:
https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2018/02/04/exceptional-work-by-sharyl-attkisson-did-fbi-violate-woods-procedures/

Sickening, says I.

Ignatius Acton Chesterton OCD said...

Ares Olympus @February 4, 2018 at 11:41 PM:

Partisanship? You think this is about partisanship? Fool.

This is a bureaucratic coup -- organized and coordinated by the executive branch -- to rig an election, entrap/destroy a duly-elected president, and then sabotage his legislative agenda.

This has nothing to do with current control of the three branches of government by a political party (as your Clinton hypothetical implies). This is about the Obama administration clandestinely launching an executive/judicial/law enforcement process (through fraud) to corrupt an election and is aftermath. To use your analogy, this is about the Bush 41 administration DOJ/FBI using the FISA court to get a warrant to spy on the Clinton campaign.

And how do you know the evidence was "cherry picked" from classified information we haven't seen yet? Sounds like you've been dutifully reading your Democrat talking points. Good boy, just like a... committed partisan. You must now be in the "stupid" category you lopped everyone else into, living in your own echo chamber. Your "Even Hillary..." comment shows how little you know. Most all the billionaires supported her.

Here is the whole thing in perhaps a language you can understand:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racket_(crime)