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tonyz 11-04-2019 18:00

The Military-Intelligence Complex
 
What would one call what has happened to Trump since the day he took office Obstruction? A coup? A conspiracy?

...a reasonable observer might at least call it disturbing, to say the least.

One thoughtful, well read and analytical observer has clearly laid out - in the piece below - the strange and unprecedented dynamics facing our sitting president.

The Military-Intelligence Complex

amgreatness.com/2019/11/03/the-military-intelligence-complex/
November 4, 2019
Victor Davis Hanson

Much has been written about the so-called Resistance of disgruntled Clinton, Obama, and progressive activists who have pledged to stop Donald Trump’s agenda. The choice of the noun “Resistance,” of course, conjures up not mere “opposition,” but is meant to evoke the French “resistance” of World War II—in the melodramatic sense of current loyal progressive patriots doing their best to thwart by almost any means necessary the Nazi-like Trump.

We know from a variety of disinterested watchdog institutions and foundations that the media has offered 90 percent negative coverage of the Trump Administration. CNN in its anti-Trump zeal has ruined its brand by serial fabrications and firings of its marquee biased reporters.

An entire array of CNN journalists and analysts either has resigned, been fired, retired, forced to offer retractions, or been disgraced either for peddling ad hominem crude attacks on Trump, displaying unprofessional behavior, concocting or repeating false stories, engaging in obscene commentary, or being refuted, including but not limited at times to Reza Aslan, Carl Bernstein, Donna Brazile, James Clapper, Marshall Cohen, Candy Crowley, Kathy Griffin, Julie Joffe, Michael Hayden, Suzanne Malveaux, Manu Raju, Jim Sciutto, Julian Zelizer, and teams such as Thomas Frank, Eric Lichtblau, and Lex Harris, and Gloria Borger, Jake Tapper, and Brian Rokus.

About every month or so, a Hollywood or entertainment personage offers a new assassination scenario of shooting, torching, stabbing, beating, blowing up, caging, or lynching the elected president.

Likewise, the country witnesses about every six weeks a new “turning point,” “bombshell,” “walls are closing in” effort to subvert the Trump presidency. And the list of such futile and fabricated attempts to abort Trump is indeed now quite monotonous: the efforts to sue three states on false charges of tampered voting machines, the attempt to subvert the voting of the Electoral College, the invocation of the ossified Logan Act, the melodramas concerning the emoluments clause and 25th Amendment, the Mueller’s Dream Team and all-star 22-month failed effort to find collusion and obstruction, the personal psychodramas of Stormy Daniels, Michael Cohen, Michael Avenatti, and the Trump tax returns, the desperate efforts to tar Trump as a “white supremacist,” followed by cries of “Recession! Recession!,” and now, of course, “Ukraine! Ukraine!”

Perhaps these efforts were best summed up by an anonymous New York Times op-ed writer who on September 5, 2018, outlined how officials within the Trump Administration took it upon themselves in the midst of the Mueller investigation to obstruct and impede the workings of the seemingly oblivious cuckold Trump: “The dilemma—which he [Trump] does not fully grasp — is that many of the senior officials in his own administration are working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations . . . I would know. I am one of them.”

The Normalization of the Coup?
Yet far more disturbing have been the furor of lame-duck and retired intelligence and military officers.

In unprecedented fashion, some have not just disagreed with the commander in chief, but have declared that he is unfit for office and by implication thus should be obstructed and perhaps even removed. Efforts such as these were recently praised by former acting CIA Director John McLaughlin, who announced to a gathering of former intelligence bureaucrats, “Thank God for the deep state.”

Donald Trump had been in office less than a month when the Wall Street Journal reported that U.S. intelligence agencies had decided on their own to withhold information from the recently inaugurated president of the United States: “In some of these cases of withheld information, officials have decided not to show Mr. Trump the sources and methods that the intelligence agencies use to collect information, the current and former officials said.”

What would one call that? Obstruction? A coup? A conspiracy?

Most of the major intelligence heads in the Obama Administration—James Comey, John Brennan, and James Clapper—either leaked classified information aimed at harming candidate and then President Trump, later declared him a veritable traitor and Russian asset, or earlier took measures to monitor his campaign or administration’s communications.

In the coming months, the investigations of Michael Horowitz, the inspector general at the Justice Department, and the department’s own criminal investigations by U.S. Attorney John Durham, may well detail one of the most extensive efforts in our history by the American intelligence agencies and their enablers in the executive branch to subvert a campaign, disrupt a presidential transition, and to abort a presidency.

Just 10 days after Trump was inaugurated, Washington insider lawyer Rosa Brooks—a former adviser in the Obama Administration to Assistant Secretary of State Harold Koh and a former special counsel to the president at George Soros’s Open Society Institute—in Foreign Policy offered formal advice about removing Trump in an article titled, “3 Ways to Get Rid of President Trump Before 2020.”

Brooks needed just over a week to conclude that the elected president had to go by means other than an election. After rejecting the first option of the usual constitutional remedy of waiting until the 2020 election (“But after such a catastrophic first week, four years seems like a long time to wait.”), Brooks offered her three fallback strategies to depose Trump:

1) Immediate impeachment. “If impeachment seems like a fine solution to you, the good news is that Congress doesn’t need evidence of actual treason or murder to move forward with an impeachment,” she wrote. “Practically anything can be considered a ‘high crime or misdemeanor.’”). Brooks did not elaborate on what “anything” might be.

2) Declaring Trump mentally unfit under the 25th Amendment. “In these dark days, some around the globe are finding solace in the 25th Amendment to the Constitution,” she wrote. Brooks did not mention that what non-U.S. citizens abroad may feel about removing Trump as mentally unfit is of no constitutional importance. Yet she was also prescient—given the later McCabe-Rosenstein comical aborted palace coup of ridding the country of a supposedly “sick” Trump.

3) A military coup, which Brooks wrote, “is one that until recently I would have said was unthinkable in the United States of America.” If not a “coup,” then “at least a refusal by military leaders to obey certain orders.” Notice the cheap praeteritio: claim that such an idea should have been previously “unthinkable” as a means to demonstrate just how thinkable it now should be.

In the months and years that followed, Brooks again proved either vatic or had foreknowledge of the sort of “resistance” that would follow.

So it is now the decision of many ex-intelligence heads and flag officers to change the rules of the game. They will live to rue the ensuing harm to the reputations both of the intelligence services and the military at large.

In early March 2017, Evelyn Farkas, an outgoing Obama-appointed deputy assistant secretary of defense, detailed in a weird revelation on MSNBC how departing Obama Administration officials scrambled to leak and undermine the six-week-old Trump Administration. “I was urging my former colleagues and, frankly speaking, the people on the Hill . . .‘Get as much information as you can. Get as much intelligence as you can before President Obama leaves the administration . . . The Trump folks, if they found out how we knew what we knew about the Trump staff’s dealing with Russians, [they] would try to compromise those sources and methods, meaning we would no longer have access to that intelligence . . . That’s why you have the leaking.”

In other words, a Pentagon official was illegally leaking documents, apparently classified, in order both to defame the president as a Russian asset and to thwart any investigation of such internal and likely illegal resistance.

The New Retired Military
At various times, an entire pantheon of retired generals and intelligence directors has gone to Twitter or progressive cable channels like CNN and MSNBC to declare the president of the United States either a Russian asset and thus a traitor, or unfit for office, or in some other way to call for his removal before the election of 2020—for some, seemingly in violation of the code of military conduct that forbids even retired officers from defaming the commander-in-chief. None cited any felonious conduct on Trump’s part; all were infuriated either by presidential comportment and tone or policies with which they disagreed.

tonyz 11-04-2019 18:02

The Military-Intelligence Complex...VDH Cont’d from above page 2.



Retired four-star general Barry McCaffrey for the past three years has leveled a number of ad hominemcharges against the elected president. He essentially called the president a threat to American national security on grounds that his loyalties were more to Vladimir Putin than to his own country. McCaffrey later called the president “stupid” and “cruel” for recalibrating the presence of trip-wire troops in-between Kurdish and Turkish forces. He recently equated Trump’s cancellation of the White House subscriptions of the New York Times and the Washington Post to the fascist dictator Benito Mussolini (“This is Mussolini”).

When a retired military officer decides and announces that the current president is the equivalent of a fascist, mass-murdering dictator who seized power and defied constitutional norms, then what is the signal conveyed to other military officers?

Retired General Stanley McChrystal—removed from command by the Obama Administration for inter aliaallegedly referring to the vice president as “Bite Me”—called the president “immoral and dishonest.” Former CIA director Michael Hayden—a four-star Air Force general formerly smeared by the Left for defending supposed “torture” at Guantanamo—compared Trump’s policies to Nazism, when he tweeted a picture of Birkenau to illustrate the administration’s use of detention facilities at the border—a plan inaugurated by the Obama Administration—to deal with tens of thousands of illegal entrants.

One can disagree with Trump’s decision to pull a small contingent of tripwire troops back from the frontlines in Syria as Kurds (our current friends, but not our long-standing legal allies) and Turks (our long-standing legal allies, but not our current friends) fight each other, or see the logic of not putting even small numbers of U.S. troops in the middle of a Syrian quagmire.

The choice is a bad/worse dilemma, one that involves the likelihood either of not defending de facto allies or getting into a shooting scenario against de jure allies. So why would retired General John Allen instead attack the commander-in-chief in moral terms rather than merely criticize the president’s strategic or operational judgment: “There is blood on Trump’s hands for abandoning our Kurdish allies”?

Again, when our best and brightest former generals and admirals inform the nation that the current elected president, with whom they disagree on both Middle East and border security policies, is “immoral” and “cruel” or deserves bloodguilt, or is the equivalent of a fascist dictator or similar to those who set up Nazi death camps, is not the obvious inference that someone must put an end to the supposed fascistic/Nazi takeover of the government?

Apparently so.

In the eeriest series of comments, retired Admiral William McRaven has all but declared Trump a subversive traitor. Apparently in reference to fellow military also working in resistance to the president, Raven remarked, “The America that they believed in was under attack, not from without, but from within.”

In a New York Times op-ed, the decorated retired admiral went further, mostly due to his own disagreements with Trump’s foreign policy, especially toward the Turkish-Kurd standoff in Syria, and his dislike of the president’s style and behavior. Indeed, McRaven seemed to call for Trump to be removed before the 2020 election, “[I]t is time for a new person in the Oval Office—Republican, Democrat or independent—the sooner, the better. The fate of our Republic depends upon it.” (Emphasis added.)

Let us be clear about what McRaven wrote. We are just one year away from a constitutionally mandated election. Yet McRaven now wants a “new person” in the Oval Office and he wants it “the sooner, the better.” And he insists our collective fate as a constitutional republic depends on Trump’s preferable “sooner” removal.

What exactly is the admiral referring to? Impeachment? Invocation of the 25th Amendment? Or the last of Rosa Brooks’ proposals: a forced removal by the military?

Note again, the common thread in all these complaints is not demonstrable high crimes and misdemeanors but rather sharp policy disagreements with the president about the Middle East, or the president’s own retaliatory and sometimes crass pushbacks, usually against prior ad hominem attacks both from serving and retired military officers, or false claims that Trump was a veritable asset, something refuted by Robert Mueller’s 22-month, $35-million-dollar investigation of “collusion.”

An Honorable “Seven Days in May”?
Note that the Left seems either amused or supportive of the current furor of our retired officers and intelligence heads (in a way they were not with General Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security advisor)—a phenomenon that began during the Iraq War when an array of retired officers was canonized by the media and past Pentagon critics for declaring the Bush Iraq War variously stupid, immoral, or doomed to failure.

Apparently, an ascendant progressive view is that our armed forces, CIA, FBI, and NSA are protectors of civil liberties and progressive values, and therefore are to be lauded for almost any rhetorical attacks on the president deemed necessary to remind the country of the danger that Trump supposedly poses.

Gone are the old days when Hollywood’s “Dr. Strangelove” warned us of supposed Curtis LeMay-reactionaries, or the 1964 political melodrama, “Seven Days in May,” that envisioned a future right-wing military coup against an idealistic president in the mold of Adlai Stevenson.

Instead, the military in the present age—or at least its Beltway incarnation—has been recalibrated by the Left as a kindred progressive Washington institution, perhaps because of its necessary ability to enact change by fiat, whether in regard to issues regarding diversity, feminism, global warming, or transgenderism—all without the mess, delay, and acrimony of legislative and executive bickering.

In the past, when retired generals rarely and inappropriately weighed in on the allegedly improper, stupid, or immoral drift of a contemporary progressive president, they were met by a progressive firestorm as potential insurrectionaries. General Douglas MacArthur was roundly hated by the Left for his often boisterous and improper attacks on President Truman’s decision not to expand the war in Korea.

Again, today there has arisen a quite different—and far more dangerous—calculus in which the media canonizes rather than audits retired officers who compare the commander-in-chief to a fascist, declare him unfit, or dream of his “sooner the better” removal.

Had any of the current generals said anything similar about President Obama in the fashion they now routinely attack Trump, their public careers would have been ruined. There would have been Adam Schiff-like progressive congressional inquiries about the current status of the code of military conduct as it pertains, not to quite legitimate political editorialization, but rather to “contemptuous words against the President, the Vice President, Congress, the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of a military department, the Secretary of Homeland Security, or the Governor or legislature of any State . . . ”

Attacking Trump in “contemptuous” fashion is not speaking truth to power but a confirmation of the existing status quo of the media, progressive orthodoxy, and the general Washington bipartisan bureaucracy.

The result is that many retired high-ranking officers have made the necessary adjustments. Many have gone well beyond legitimately articulating why Trump may be wrong on foreign policy, and now feel free to malign, insult, and even dream of removing their commander-in-chief, on the grounds that Trump is sui generis, that the media will applaud their efforts, and that the bipartisan foreign-policy establishment will canonize their deep-state bravery.

Perhaps.

But the danger is that half the country will conclude that too many retired generals and admirals are going the way of past CIA and FBI directors—no longer just esteemed professionals, op-ed writers, and astute analysts, but political activists who feel entitled to challenge the very legitimacy of an elected president—a development that is ruinous both for the reputation of a hallowed military and of the country in general.

So it is now the decision of many ex-intelligence heads and flag officers, as retirees, analysts, and businesspeople, to change the rules of the game. Again fine. But they will live to rue the ensuing harm to the reputations both of the intelligence services and the military at large.

Indeed, the damage is well underway.

https://www.printfriendly.com/p/g/RWxuNC

Paslode 11-04-2019 22:08

Quote:

Originally Posted by tonyz (Post 653889)
What would one call what has happened to Trump since the day he took office Obstruction? A coup? A conspiracy?

Actually Tonyz, it first appeared the day after he announced he was running for President, that was June 16, 2015. It was a LGBT and Animal Rights Activist, I believe the very next day, who set me back in my tracks a step or two when they said to me that 'Trump was the next Adolf Hitler' and the country was in mortal danger if he ascended to the Presidency. At this point Trump's entry was a big F---ing joke, and why or how anyone could conceive he was the next Hitler seemed a bit looney.

This timeline is corroborated in this post from 2016:

http://professionalsoldiers.com/foru...&postcount=110


So IHMO, the seeds were sewn long before Trump became a candidate. I believe it is very possibly that Trump and his administration are the recipients of a conspiracy by the Obama administration to over throw the NEXT duly elected President if they were Republican. If Cruz had been elected it would have been him.


Here are a few threads to revisit as we approach the 2020 Election:

GOP getting ready to dump Trump?

Trumped

2016 Presidential Thread

Three more years of sweet liberal tears

tonyz 11-05-2019 06:01

Yup. No doubt that the attacks on Trump can be documented prior to election. But Hanson, in this piece, focuses on the political activism practiced by the heads of intelligence agencies, the FBI and a number of retired high ranking officers. Culturally, and politically this is new ground. ”...the danger is that half the country will conclude that too many retired generals and admirals are going the way of past CIA and FBI directors—no longer just esteemed professionals, op-ed writers, and astute analysts, but political activists who feel entitled to challenge the very legitimacy of an elected president—a development that is ruinous both for the reputation of a hallowed military and of the country in general.”

More from the Hanson piece.

“In the past, when retired generals rarely and inappropriately weighed in on the allegedly improper, stupid, or immoral drift of a contemporary progressive president, they were met by a progressive firestorm as potential insurrectionaries. General Douglas MacArthur was roundly hated by the Left for his often boisterous and improper attacks on President Truman’s decision not to expand the war in Korea.

Again, today there has arisen a quite different—and far more dangerous—calculus in which the media canonizes rather than audits retired officers who compare the commander-in-chief to a fascist, declare him unfit, or dream of his “sooner the better” removal.

Had any of the current generals said anything similar about President Obama in the fashion they now routinely attack Trump, their public careers would have been ruined. There would have been Adam Schiff-like progressive congressional inquiries about the current status of the code of military conduct as it pertains, not to quite legitimate political editorialization, but rather to “contemptuous words against the President, the Vice President, Congress, the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of a military department, the Secretary of Homeland Security, or the Governor or legislature of any State . . . ”

Attacking Trump in “contemptuous” fashion is not speaking truth to power but a confirmation of the existing status quo of the media, progressive orthodoxy, and the general Washington bipartisan bureaucracy.

The result is that many retired high-ranking officers have made the necessary adjustments. Many have gone well beyond legitimately articulating why Trump may be wrong on foreign policy, and now feel free to malign, insult, and even dream of removing their commander-in-chief, on the grounds that Trump is sui generis, that the media will applaud their efforts, and that the bipartisan foreign-policy establishment will canonize their deep-state bravery.

Perhaps.

But the danger is that half the country will conclude that too many retired generals and admirals are going the way of past CIA and FBI directors—no longer just esteemed professionals, op-ed writers, and astute analysts, but political activists who feel entitled to challenge the very legitimacy of an elected president—a development that is ruinous both for the reputation of a hallowed military and of the country in general.

So it is now the decision of many ex-intelligence heads and flag officers, as retirees, analysts, and businesspeople, to change the rules of the game. Again fine. But they will live to rue the ensuing harm to the reputations both of the intelligence services and the military at large.

Indeed, the damage is well underway.”

Pas, thanks for those links from the 2016 election as we approach 2020. All a reminder that Washington DC is a swamp filled with deep state obstructors, a media which operates as a propaganda arm for one major political party and now former high ranking military officers and former heads of intelligence agencies given voice as political activists. Interesting times.

Badger52 11-05-2019 06:14

Quote:

Originally Posted by tonyz (Post 653890)
So it is now the decision of many ex-intelligence heads and flag officers, as retirees, analysts, and businesspeople, to change the rules of the game. Again fine. But they will live to rue the ensuing harm to the reputations both of the intelligence services and the military at large.

VDH and I must part company here; it's not fine. And I don't believe for a minute that the current cabal of treasonous slugs give a shit about the integrity of their former organization. Such people are self-centered to the point that protection & promotion of #1 is the Prime Directive. They will require rather draconian measures to be dealt with.

The inherent civility that dances around such subjects is why the commies have made the progress they have; they have the propaganda machine so it's easy - their piece of "free-speech" isn't censored. On the other hand pointing out these tyrants' and Generallisimos' perfidy, and calling for them to be stood up against a wall, isn't likely to be examined objectively.
:munchin

tonyz 11-05-2019 06:31

Quote:

Originally Posted by Badger52 (Post 653895)
Such people are self-centered to the point that protection & promotion of #1 is the Prime Directive. They will require rather draconian measures to be dealt with.

The inherent civility that dances around such subjects is why the commies have made the progress they have; they have the propaganda machine so it's easy - their piece of "free-speech" isn't censored. On the other hand pointing out these tyrants' and Generallisimos' perfidy, and calling for them to be stood up against a wall, isn't likely to be examined objectively.
:munchin

Badger, you nailed a number of very crucial issues in your short reply ...our cultural rot wherein self-promotion is the prime directive and the double standard when applied to speech today.

Moreover, what type of nation do you beget when self-promotion is the rule of the day not just for those elected but for those appointed to our highest military and intelligence institutions ? The eventual outcome of this attribute appears inevitable and it is not pretty. When you combine this self-centered, self-righteous, uncivil tone from our “elites” with the double standard as to speech - one can predict the gapping divide in our nation.

ETA: I read Hanson’s use of the phrase “fine” (as and where you identified) as not so much an agreement with that action but more of a recognition that while these “elites” are free to malign and even change the rules (in a free country) those actions have consequences and those consequences are not healthy for either the nation or the military/intelligence cohort.

Now, in addition to the problems with double standards as to speech...what about the the double standard as to legal standards and criminal justice as regards the elite? The recipe for predictable division in our nation could not be more predictable if actually scripted.

Paslode 11-05-2019 07:17

Quote:

Originally Posted by tonyz (Post 653894)
But Hanson, in this piece, focuses on the political activism practiced by the heads of intelligence agencies, the FBI and a number of retired high ranking officers. Culturally, and politically this is new ground

He does indeed, but my point is they and many others started this long before Trump entered the race, or was elected. It is a vast network of conspirators fundamentally changing America and up-rooting all it was founded upon. It's a coup against America, and the American idea. Trump just happened to get caught up in it.

Trapper John 11-05-2019 07:18

Quote:

Originally Posted by Badger52 (Post 653895)
VDH and I must part company here; it's not fine. And I don't believe for a minute that the current cabal of treasonous slugs give a shit about the integrity of their former organization. Such people are self-centered to the point that protection & promotion of #1 is the Prime Directive. They will require rather draconian measures to be dealt with.

The inherent civility that dances around such subjects is why the commies have made the progress they have; they have the propaganda machine so it's easy - their piece of "free-speech" isn't censored. On the other hand pointing out these tyrants' and Generallisimos' perfidy, and calling for them to be stood up against a wall, isn't likely to be examined objectively.
:munchin

BINGO!!:lifter

Box 11-05-2019 07:23

Cancel culture has weaponized the problem further.

Like I've said - a general (or admiral) at war will stay at war until acted upon by an external force. Publicly call one out on their actions and it will end badly for you 10 out of 9 times.
...besides, sometimes the external force just causes "more war"


Its a great time to bear witness to America.

tonyz 11-05-2019 07:25

Quote:

Originally Posted by Paslode (Post 653898)
He does indeed, but my point is they and many others started this long before Trump entered the race, or was elected. It is a vast network of conspirators fundamentally changing America and up-rooting all it was founded upon. It's a coup against America, and the American idea. Trump just happened to get caught up in it.

Concur whole-heartedly with your observations here. The new wrinkle is the political activism by some folks who have historically remained relatively objective information brokers. That has changed. The “transformers” have upped the ante so to speak. Is this out of desperation or strength? Would we even know about the depths of the roots of this movement had Trump not been elected? (This question is rhetorical).

tonyz 11-05-2019 08:33

Strength or fear ???
 
Media-Democrat Tantrum a Fear Response
By Fletch Daniels
American Thinker
November 1, 2019

In 1776, 56 men signed the Declaration of Independence, knowing that their actions would be viewed as treason by the prevailing power. Should the revolution fail, they were signing their death certificates.

Indeed, many paid a heavy price. Five were captured, tortured, and killed. Nine more were killed in the fighting and the hardships it produced. Many sacrificed sons, homes, and livelihoods. But these brave patriots helped win America's independence and set it on a path to become a constitutional republic.

Fast-forward a mere 240 years. A group of corrupt and craven people gathered in secret to once again consider radical actions. But, unlike the Declaration's signers, they were the prevailing power and intended to remain so, fully confident in their complete control of government, the media, the Judiciary, academia, entertainment, and nearly every form of cultural power.

They feared no consequences. It was simply inconceivable to them that with so many hands on the scales, they could possibly lose an election.

And then they did. All of their treasonous misdeeds that were supposed to not only be covered up, but rewarded by the queen of corruption were suddenly a real vulnerability. They weren't just shattered by the election loss. They were genuinely afraid.

But they weren't defenseless. They had lost the presidency and did not control Congress, but they still controlled the other pillars of power. So they doubled down on lawlessness and planned a coup under the most ridiculous pretenses, knowing that an administration under siege would be much less likely to uncover and expose their villainy.

I believe that the active intervention of Admiral Mike Rogers, the then-director of the National Security Agency, may have prevented its success.

Their efforts certainly delayed any day of reckoning, and the jury is still out on whether that reckoning can still come in this country where the Left has such control of the bureaucracy and media.

But President Donald Trump is a rare politician. Despite all the churn and seditious efforts, he remained the happy warrior, never losing sight of the importance of uncovering the origins of the coup attempt. And, in the appointment of William Barr as attorney general, he finally had the right guy, a kindred spirit with the moral courage to ignore the noise and see it through.

That brings us to today. The media-Democrat establishment is increasingly reacting like a cornered feral beast.

The Schiff show secret impeachment hearings, the Nancy Pelosi decision to move forward on impeachment procedures, the media meltdown over President Trump's success in sending Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi to justice, and the increasing comical chorus of calls for William Barr to recuse himself can all be understood as a collective Democrat fear response.

They are pushing their poker chips to the center of the table in a last desperate attempt to discredit the real investigation that is proceeding methodically and relentlessly forward: U.S. attorney John Durham's now criminal probe into alleged misconduct at the Justice Department. The leftist noise is going to only get louder.

It is no coincidence that after this news came out, Adam Schiff amped up his lies, phones in every defense attorney office in Washington lit up like a Christmas tree, and the media screeds became even more of a parody.

It is within this environment that the Washington Post ran one of the most appalling headlines of all time. How dare President Trump ruthlessly kill an austere religious scholar, and one with such beautiful wire-rimmed glasses?

The full media are in one of the craziest spin cycles on record as they desperately try to drown out any favorable news for the president. Every shred of positive news damages their desperate discrediting effort.

This is why the media quickly pivoted to gleefully reporting that government bureaucrats and D.C. elitists booed President Trump at the Washington Nationals baseball game shortly after he oversaw the elimination of the world's most wanted terrorist.

Sometimes, it really does feel as if Trump is playing 4-D chess — or perhaps a more apt description would be that his opponents are playing hangman against themselves.

He could not have better scripted a display of out-of-touch Washington anti-American elitism. A person is known even more by his enemies than by his friends, and Trump has made all the right ones.

It is also within this environment that Nancy Pelosi is moving forward on impeachment procedures. This is not a step she wanted to take. Her preference was to bleed this impeachment façade out behind closed doors, where Democrats could slowly drip out hand-selected soundbites between now and the 2020 election. Pelosi did not want to actually vote on impeachment, when her more vulnerable members would need to go on record. Even worse, she does not want to send this to the Senate, where she knows there are not the twenty Pierre Delectos she would need. Democrats would lose control of the narrative.

But the secret tribunal effort is already losing steam, thanks to the Republicans successfully drawing attention to what is going on.

With the I.G. report and investigations looming over their heads like a guillotine blade, Pelosi took the plunge.

The media-Democrat establishment has a limited window to keep public interest in their own false investigation, which they are trying to time to do the most damage to the credibility of the real investigation unfolding.

If Republicans had tried to hold a secret partisan trial of President Barack Obama, swooning reporters would have chained themselves in front of the door and screamed about democracy dying in darkness in their most self-righteous Tom Hanks voices. Republican villainy would have been the only story on the news until they backed down in shame.

Media bias comes in many forms, but one of the most effective forms is in their ability to frame stories. There is an entire cottage industry in "Republicans pounce" stories to frame even terrible Democrat news as somehow harmful to Republicans. But to frame this story the way the media want to frame it, they needed help.

This is why we now have dueling investigations, one a complete façade and the other deadly serious. There is no secret in how these will be covered by the media. The fraud impeachment circus will be treated with full gravity and seriousness, while what might be the most important investigation in U.S. history will be treated as political payback.

But this is an investigation that is essential to restoring faith in the republic. There is so much we already know. We know that a decorated Soldier, Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, was set up in an obscene miscarriage of justice by corrupt and evil FBI agents. We know that the appointed leadership of nearly every intelligence agency illegally spied on and attempted to remove a duly elected president.

The inconvenient fact for the Left is that a secret group of plotters at the highest level of government, perhaps including the then-president himself, committed some of the most outrageous crimes in U.S. history that threatened to forever destroy constitutional governance.

That decision set in motion the news and drama that we hear today. And every single media-Democrat resource is being thrown into the fight to prevent and discredit the justice they fear is coming ever closer.


https://www.americanthinker.com/arti..._response.html

Fletch Daniels blogs at deplorabletouchdown.com and can be found on Twitter at @fletchdaniels.

Paslode 11-05-2019 08:52

Quote:

Originally Posted by tonyz (Post 653901)
Concur whole-heartedly with your observations here. The new wrinkle is the political activism by some folks who have historically remained relatively objective information brokers. That has changed. The “transformers” have upped the ante so to speak. Is this out of desperation or strength? Would we even know about the depths of the roots of this movement had Trump not been elected? (This question is rhetorical).

Considering that the Democratic Socialists has a big following in DC and surrounding areas it should be no surprise with what is happening.

It's been a long time since folks in those positions have remained objective, its far more likely they remained silent while working their activist agenda behind the scenes. What's changed is their confidence to do it in the open. Years ago, Glenn Beck went on and on about how this would happen more and more as things progressed. Is this a out of desperation or strength? I think it's a bit of both. With so many coming out in the daylight, the optics allow them the confidence to roam freely and spew their bile. But at the same time their agenda is at a tipping point where it could all come crashing down.

Brennan, Clapper, Gates, Rice, The Ugly Redhead, McRaven, McMaster, etc., etc., etc. all have a stake in this game if they lose they may need to find a new country to reside in because they might end up on the Most Wanted list. Lets also not forget the many silent co-conspirators and stake holders like John McCain, Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, Lindsey Graham, Jeff Sessions, Richard Burr and many, many others on the alleged opposite of the isle who done all their power or who have sit idly by and let it happen.


Trump was the wild card, he really threw a stick in their spokes. Had Jebby, HRC or any of other DC favorites won they would have just gone with the flow and we would have never known. If they win, it's going to get really, really ugly. Actually win or lose it will probably get really ugly.

Old Dog New Trick 11-05-2019 10:44

There is really only one way a movement this large and this coordinated amongst so many different “heads” of departments, government officials and GO/Flag Officers takes place. I doubt very much that “he”* is/was intelligent enough to be the puppet master, but he certainly is/was aware of the coordination necessary to establish the so called “insurance policy” if in case their candidate lost or died.

I’m having deep reservations about what finally gets reported in the IG Horowitz report and the Durham investigation into the Mueller report. The insiders which is the “Deep State” and the toxic algae growing in the “swamp” will not allow the host to be compromised, it will be the end of democracy as they envisioned it as far back as the mid to late 60’s.

Maybe what is needed is a coup by the legitimate citizens to take back their country from the hippy revolution because the experiment is failing.

If (when) Trump is re-elected to a second term this “resistance rebellion” will rise to a new and potentially dangerous level with open hostilities and attempts to assassinate their opposition including POTUS to achieve their goals.


* BHO

JMO

Badger52 11-05-2019 11:09

Quote:

Originally Posted by tonyz (Post 653896)
The recipe for predictable division in our nation could not be more predictable if actually scripted.

Welll as we used to say, "there it is."

Quote:

Originally Posted by Old Dog New Trick (Post 653906)
If (when) Trump is re-elected to a second term this “resistance rebellion” will rise to a new and potentially dangerous level with open hostilities and attempts to assassinate their opposition including POTUS to achieve their goals.

He's going to rue the day he didn't conduct a massive purge Jan 2017. Brennan still has deep reach (along with his clearance) into the CIA and top remaining 4 people are still "Brennan people,." Great. :rolleyes:

Old Dog New Trick 11-05-2019 11:36

Quote:

Originally Posted by Badger52 (Post 653907)
Welll as we used to say, "there it is."

He's going to rue the day he didn't conduct a massive purge Jan 2017. Brennan still has deep reach (along with his clearance) into the CIA and top remaining 4 people are still "Brennan people,." Great. :rolleyes:

In the future going forward I think the idea of “non-partisan” or “apolitical” government employees in position of power and military leadership is going to become a bygone era. Regardless of how well you ‘were’ doing your job the level of scrutiny will be high. Background investigations will include political support and ideology questions and if you don’t fit you don’t get to keep your job/position or title. And certainly not your clearance.

“If you like your job, you can keep your job” except you can’t!

GO’s asked to pledge their support and loyalty to the CinC or retire by Inauguration Day. Directors and all supporting staff of alphabet agencies asked to step down or be fired.

It will help eliminate those career employees sucking oxygen behind a desk in a cubicle and cut federal retirement costs on the American tax payers. Every four to eight years fresh college graduates can go to USA-Jobs and apply for all sorts of openings.

The Democrats (in some form or another) are going get their power back and the day they do they are going to go scorched-earth-policy on everyone. Republicans are always too nice...need to change.


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