Roger Simon
WHY ARE THERE SO MANY HOMELESS IN LOS ANGELES?
Los Angeles today
I left Los Angeles for Nashville slightly over a year ago. When I call friends back in my former home (for 50 years), most of them tell me I got out just in time.
Actually, they're wrong. I should have gotten out ten or even fifteen years before. The handwriting was on the wall. "California dreamin'," pace Mama Cass, "was no longer a ray-al-it-tee." It hasn't been for a long time.
Now everybody knows about the 36,000 homeless on the streets of LA, over 60,000 in the county, replete with human feces and syringes littering the sidewalks, along with rats, typhus and even rumors of bubonic plague.
And those figures are what we're told. The real numbers could be three or four times the number. Why are they here?
RUSSIA MAY NEVER HAVE ANOTHER AIRCRAFT CARRIER
Russia’s last carrier, the Admiral Kuznetsov
The saga of Russia’s only aircraft carrier, the Admiral Kuznetsov, has lurched from one embarrassing episode to another.
The vessel (technically classified as a “heavy aircraft cruiser” to be able to adhere to Montreux Convention restrictions on aircraft carriers passing through the Turkish Straits) is currently undergoing repairs and retrofitting .It will not be replaced with a more modern carrier for at least another 15 years—and quite possibly never.
The situation brings to mind Richard Hough’s classic 1958 study, The Fleet That Had to Die, about the failure and destruction of the Russian naval fleet in 1905 at the hands of the Japanese. Like that long-ago event, which culminated in the disaster at the Tsushima Straits, the current history is replete with bold promises of breakthroughs but marred by malfeasance, corruption and incompetence.
Not only does all this highlight Russia’s decline as a naval power, it also underscores the problematic natures of the Russian defense establishment and political system.
THE ROCKY OF AMERICAN POLITICS
The twenty thousand people in the arena, along with the thousands of people outside watching on jumbo screens were all on the same page: He has been a great President these past two and a half years and they want more of the same.
The crowd was excited, happy, and phenomenally supportive of the President, much to the chagrin of the Angry Left. And boy are they angry.
Their anger is why Trump's rally last night in Orlando, if they deigned to watch, will have left them quivering in their boots with shock. Most probably did not watch, like the scene in Rocky when Apollo Creed is too busy to look at the video of Rocky in the meat locker when his trainer tries to get him to pay attention.
YES, ILLEGAL ALIENS WHO BREAK OUR LAWS TWICE DESERVE DEPORTATION
The media outrage is itself outrageous.
President Trump’s renewed pledge to deport huge numbers of illegal aliens is inspiring anger, but it's hardly righteous.
If, as a Homeland Security adviser has explained, the targets of Trump’s deportation plans will be those illegal aliens who have failed to show for their assigned court hearings, then Trump is morally, ethically, and legally justified in deporting them.
The tut-tutting chorus might as well spare us their faux moral histrionics.
The aliens Trump is targeting are people who have broken American law not once but twice.
WHEN NORMALITY BECAME ABNORMAL
Donald Trump is many things. But one thing he is not is a defender of the 2009-2016 status quo and accepted progressive convention.
Since 2017, everything has been in flux. Lots of past conventional assumptions of the Obama-Clinton-Romney-Bush generation were as unquestioned as they were suspect. No longer.
Like it or not, now lines are drawn. Trump so unhinged the Left that it finally tore off its occasional veneer of moderation, and showed us what progressives had in store for America.
One way is to see this as a collision between Trump, the proverbial bull, and the administrative state as a targeted precious china shop—with all the inevitable nihilistic mix-up of horns, hooves, and flying porcelain shards.
But quite another is to conclude that what we recently used to think was abjectly abnormal twenty years ago had become not just “normal,” but so orthodoxly normal that even suggesting it was not was judged to be heretical and deserving of censure and worse.
JUSTICE THOMAS AND THE DYNAMITE OF NATURAL RIGHTS
Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas
If it’s true that “natural right is dynamite,” as political philosopher Leo Strauss wrote, then Justice Clarence Thomas just went nuclear on the abortion debate.
While Thomas’s concurring opinion in Box v. Planned Parenthood (5/28)has received considerable commentary, his deepening of the judicial and, hence, the political debate over abortion demands further elaboration. His reply to the leading threat to the principles of the Declaration of Independence is his latest attempt in a career of restoring its authority.
The ugly nakedness of the eugenics dogma, with its attendant euphemisms, stands exposed in Thomas’s explanation of Roe. No longer can credible critics of the court turn away from the monstrosity and focus on federalism and substantive due process clause interpretation issues.
The new, politicized abortion goes to the core of American political principles and the abiding integrity of the Declaration of Independence. Here’s how deeply the Thomas charge cuts:
DEMOCRAT-RUN CALIFORNIA HAS BECOME A THIRD WORLD NATION
Homeless encampment on residential street in Orange County CA
Mark Levin appeared at the Reagan Library in Simi Valley, California last Saturday night (6/08).
The event was a celebration of his new, bestselling book, Unfreedom of the Press. It was a glorious evening. The auditorium was packed with several thousand fans with an overflow crowd in another room. Levin delivered not a speech but a conversation.
John Heubusch, the director of the Reagan Library introduced Levin then the two of them sat down. Heubusch asked questions and Levin answered in his usual inimitable fashion. The crowd loved it.
But as we were all sitting in that spectacular library in California, the state of our state was the initial topic of discussion. How did this state, once the envy of all others, become the pathetic, indebted Third World loser state it is today? The answer is simple, single-party Democrat rule.
CHINA MOVES TOWARDS ARCTIC DOMINANCE OVER RUSSIA
[Note by JW: TTP views China’s seizure of Russia’s Eastern Siberia as an inevitability – the only question is how many years in will take. See Chinese Siberia from November 2006. Here, my old friend Paul Goble describes the latest moves of Beijing to accomplish this.
Note the hilarity of Russian obliviousness, such as the Russian “expert” claiming the US is the threat to Russia’s Arctic sovereignty and not China. If anything, the US is more on Russia’s side than China’s, as Paul points out.]
Three developments in early June 2019 call attention to China’s unrelenting efforts to become the dominant player on the Northern Sea Route (NSR)—the increasingly ice-free Arctic waterway along Russia’s northern coast, and the main segment of the longer Northeastern Passage, linking Asia and Europe.
(As you can see in the map above how much shorter (over 50%) the Northern route Yokohama to Rotterdam is versus the Suez Canal route.)
First…
ELITES ABOVE THE LAW – THE FBI TRAGEDY
Tarnished beyond repair?
One of the media and beltway orthodoxies we constantly hear is that just a few bad apples under James Comey at the FBI explain why so many FBI elites have been fired, resigned, reassigned, demoted, or retired — or just left for unexplained reasons.
In short, in about every growing scandal of the past two years — FISA, illegal leaking, spying on a presidential candidate, lying under oath, obstructing justice — someone in the FBI is involved.
In sum, why did so many top FBI officials, some with long experience in the FBI, exhibit such bad judgment and display such unethical behavior, characterized by arrogance, a sense of entitlement, and a belief that they were above both the law and the Constitution itself?
Were they really just rogue agents, lawyers, and administrators -- or are they emblematic of an FBI culture sorely gone wrong?
CHINA’S SOCIAL CREDIT SYSTEM MADE BY GOOGLE AND FACEBOOK
Made in America
With Mao's Great Leap Forward (1958-1962), it became increasingly clear China was a totalitarian police state willing to do almost anything to advance its aims.
That attempt to forcefully move from an agrarian to a socialist industrial society cost tens of millions of Chinese lives. One historian's estimate runs to a staggering 56 million deaths for that period alone, making Mao easily the greatest mass murderer of all time.
These days, however, the Chinese communists have become more subtle in the control of their populace. They are in the process of instituting a social credit system that allows the state to monitor technologically virtually every aspect of a person's life and reward or punish him or her accordingly.
And where did this ability to control such a giant country come from in the first place? As Pogo would say, I have seen the enemy and he is us! Namely, Google, Facebook, YouTube, Apple, Oracle, Intel, Cisco, and all those other American high-tech companies eager to get a piece of the fat Chinese pie.
CHINA’S DESPERATE PLEA FOR HELP FROM PUTIN
Xi and Putin in St. Petersburg, June 7
China’s economy is reeling from President Trump’s strategic tariffs, and Beijing is getting desperate.
In a futile effort to compensate for China’s losses by developing economic ties with new global partners, Chinese leader Xi Jinping last Friday (6/07) met with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Both leaders touted the meeting in typically hyperbolic terms, presumably in the hope of deceiving American policymakers into believing that they had accomplished something significant.
Putin and Xi negotiated numerous economic partnerships, such as agreeing to boost energy and technology cooperation in the coming years. Those agreements, however, are only papering over the cracks.
REVENGE OF THE NERDS
Hi y’all,
Tex wishes he had better news on the censorship front since my last column, “They Must Be Stopped”, but as predicted it’s only gotten worse.
Like the movie referenced in this column’s title, it’s as if the increased censorship by Big Tech is like “Revenge of the Nerds” writ large. The “freaks” we all knew in high school that never fit in have aligned themselves with the popular kids, to form an unholy alliance against those that never accepted them.
Indeed, I’ve sat down to write this column at least 5 times in the last few weeks, but each time the number of people “unpersonned” from the dominant social media “platforms” had increased.
So here’s how worse it’s getting, and what can be done about it.
ON THE 30TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE TIANANMEN SQUARE MASSACRE
On June 4, we honor the heroic protest movement of the Chinese people that ended on June 4, 1989, when the Chinese Communist Party leadership sent tanks into Tiananmen Square to violently repress peaceful demonstrations calling for democracy, human rights, and an end to rampant corruption.
The hundreds of thousands of protesters who gathered in Beijing and in other cities around China suffered grievously in pursuit of a better future for their country. The number of dead is still unknown.
We express our deep sorrow to the families still grieving their lost loved ones, including the courageous Tiananmen Mothers, who have never stopped seeking accountability, despite great personal risk. The events of thirty years ago still stir our conscience, and the conscience of freedom-loving people around the world.
TREASON, INC.
Before the defeat of Hillary Clinton, the idea that the Russians or anyone else could warp or tamper with our elections in any serious manner was laughed off by President Obama.
Obama was anxious that the sure-to-be-sore-loser Trump would not blame his defeat on voting impropriety in a fashion that might call into question Clinton’s victory.
How ironic that Russian “collusion” was used as a preemptive charge after Trump’s victory from those who actually had colluded with Russians for all sorts for financial and careerist advantages.
“Obstruction” is now supposedly the key to destroying the Trump Administration after collusion imploded. But what exactly would real obstruction of justice look like?
THE ENTITLED UNINVITED
On a Sunday afternoon last month (5/19), Etta Nugent found Marco Cobos, an illegal alien from Mexico, at her doorstep in Houston after his truck had broken down nearby. Cobos forced his way into the elderly lady’s home and stabbed her in the chest.
Nugent’s horrific fate has become all too common in an America that has bought into the lie that it is “a nation of immigrants,” rather than simply a nation. Increasingly, however, immigrants show little appreciation, often outright hostility, for this nation and its people.
Consider the “Dreamers” of North Carolina, thousands of illegal aliens who were brought, illegally, into the country by their parents. The fact that they have not been deported despite their unlawful presence is, in itself, a benefit undeservingly conferred upon them.
We have tens of millions of the entitled uninvited in our country. What are we going to do about it?
THE CLIMATE CASE OF THE CENTURY
Twelve years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Massachusetts v. EPA that greenhouse gases are air pollutants covered by the Clean Air Act. The decision in effect gave the Environmental Protection Agency massive additional regulatory authority.
This year, another landmark climate case appears headed for the high court: Juliana v. United States. This time, the stakes are even higher.
The “endangerment finding” in Massachusetts v. EPA was a missed opportunity for climate skeptics to have an honest debate on the entire scientific basis of climate activism. The failure of climate skeptics to successfully argue their position in Massachusetts has created a powerful precedent that favors the plaintiffs in Juliana.
Nonetheless, Juliana is an opportunity to challenge every scientific premise of the climate activist lobby. For example:
THE MUELLER-COMEY ONE-TWO PUNCH
Most Americans are unaware of the long history of comradeship and chicanery between Special Counsel Robert Mueller and former FBI Director James Comey.
For nearly two decades, the pair have held the same jobs, earned the same foes, and swaggered in the same rarified sphere of political prestige and privilege.
This week, the country has been treated to another reminder of how often the twosome operates in tandem. Now thanks to another grudge-seeking joint stunt by Mueller and Comey, the Democrats and the media are recharged and ready to chase the folly of impeachment in time for the 2020 election.
ROBERT MUELLER IS A SLEAZY SHAMEFUL PARTISAN HACK
Robert Mueller should have been disbarred decades ago, along with his enforcer Andrew Weismann; that is how egregious his record of malfeasance is, all matters of public record.
What he did yesterday morning (5/29) was his final IED tossed at the President to placate his Democrat overlords who desperately want to impeach Trump.
But for what? Mueller gave no list of felonies in his report nor did he detail any crimes of which Trump is even amorphously guilty.
Who made him embarrass himself by offering the Democrats a new path to impeachment? Who has something on Bob Mueller?
THE ANTI-TRUMP WAR-MONGERING CONSPIRACY OF DEMOCRATS AND CHICOMS
The President and First Lady meet the Emperor and Empress of Japan (5/27)
Donald Trump’s opponents at home and abroad would love to see him get the U.S. into a messy intervention right before the election.
A big China trade deal, an agreement to denuclearize North Korea and Iran, flipping Putin to become a neutral rather than an adversary, or a Middle East halfway accord could change global realities and empower the U.S.
And so the gambler Trump wagers that he can do overseas what he did at home and pull off land-breaking agreements — all at once.
Can he? The Democrats and Chinese Communists want him to fail instead, and are actively conspiring to see that he does.
PUTIN THE PASSIVE IN PRESIDING OVER HIS PYRAMID OF CORRUPTION
In key global debates, Russia’s voice has been uncharacteristically timid lately.
Various Russian domestic controversies are developing without the usual heavy-handed interference from the Kremlin—almost as if President Vladimir Putin has lost interest in the affairs of state.
Yet, as might have been expected, this current neglect of domestic matters is not caused by an overabundance of demanding international concerns. Progressing economic weakness is a major underlying cause of Putin’s political passivity, to the degree that he is aware of this feebleness.
Is he losing his confidence and will?
ABORTION VS. CIVILIZATION
The recent push in Alabama to restrict most abortions has energized the culture war. But despite the seething passions on both sides, nothing has really changed.
Abortion has always been anti-family, always been about convenience, and always been evil.
What has changed is the candor of abortion extremists. The far Left’s recent embrace of late-term abortion on demand is as sign that the time for compromise and “dialogue” is rapidly fading.
Almost all people are still repulsed by overt infanticide—and most well-meaning liberals who aren’t so extreme probably do not realize what they are supporting when they acquiesce to a general “right to choose”—but the embrace of late-term abortion as a serious topic of discussion heralds a nation in decline.
The truth is that abortion is not just a “leftist” issue. It’s a gruesome convenience with which a broad swath of America has made peace.
FEDERAL RATS ARE FLEEING THE SINKING COLLUSION SHIP
The entire Trump-Russia collusion narrative was always implausible.
No wonder that special counsel Robert Mueller’s partisan team spent 22 months and $34 million only to conclude the obvious: that Trump did not collude with Russia.
Mueller’s failure to find collusion prompts an important question. If the Steele dossier—the basis for unfounded charges that Trump colluded with Russia—was fraudulent, then how and why did the Clinton campaign, hand in glove with top Obama administration officials, use such silly trash and smears to unleash the powers of government against Trump’s campaign, transition team and early presidency?
The question is not an idle one.
THE MOST LAW-ABIDING PRESIDENT EVER!
The Left in America hates, loathes, and despises President Trump. Why? Because he is not one of them, and he won. He was not supposed to win. How could he have prevailed? The leftists had it wrapped up. All the polls said so, just as they said climate change Labor candidate Shorten was a shoe-in in Australia. Oops.
Trump's victory in the 2016 election was a cataclysmic shock to the establishment whose members believed, with every fiber of their being, that they ran things, all things governmental.
The denizens of D.C. do not pay much attention to party affiliation. They all abided by the Beltway rules: never rock the boat. Get elected, do the bidding of your donors, and get rich. That's it for the bulk of them, but thankfully not all of them.
THE NEW RIGHT IS BEATING THE NEW LEFT EVERYWHERE
Scott Morrison wins in Australia
Sometimes political revolutions occur right before our eyes without us quite realizing it. I think that’s what’s been happening over the last few weeks around the world, and the message is clear:
The populist “New Right” isn’t going away anytime soon, and the rise of the “New Left” is exaggerated.
Start with Australia, where Prime Minister Scott Morrison won a surprising victory. Before the election, polls had almost uniformly indicated that his Liberal-National Coalition would have to step down, but voters were of another mind.
This is happening all over the world now. Here’s a summary.
BIDEN THE DIVIDER
Was Joe Biden projecting when he called Donald Trump the "divider-in-chief" in his big campaign speech in Philadelphia Saturday (5/18)?
The former Veep proposed -- in imitation of his one-time boss and apparent idol Barack Obama -- that he would be the man to unite our riven country.
Right. He represents a political party that could not accept the 2016 election of Donald Trump on any level, before or after his victory. Their supporters taking to the streets almost immediately, they and their compliant media were talking about impeachment before Trump was even inaugurated.
Where was Biden in that extraordinarily divisive behavior? Not uttering a peep.
THE GLOBAL REVOLT AGAINST THE GLOBAL WARMING HOAX
From Alberta to Australia, from Finland to France, and beyond, voters are increasingly showing their displeasure with expensive energy policies imposed by politicians in an inane effort to purportedly fight human-caused climate change.
Skepticism over whether humans are causing dangerous climate change has always been higher in America than in most industrialized countries. As a result, governments in Europe, Canada, and other developed areas are much farther along the energy rationing path, cutting carbon dioxide emissions as required.
However, residents in these countries began to revolt in 2018 against the higher energy costs they suffer under due to high taxes on fossil fuels and mandates to use expensive renewable energy.
But 2018 was just a prelude for the political climate revolt to come. Here’s what’s happening now.
WHY THE DEMOCRATS HAVE EMBRACED ANTI-SEMITISM
Grand Mufti Amin Al-Husseini with Hitler – Nov. 28, 1941
If you harbor any doubts that the Democrat Party has fully embraced anti-Semitism, you can put them to rest by tuning in to C-SPAN and watching the replay of a single congressional session that began at 3:30 p.m. Wednesday (5/15).
The representative standing at the Rostrum, proudly presiding over the floor proceedings for the United States House of Representatives was none other than Rashida Tlaib. She actually pretended the founder of Palestinian Anti-Semitic terrorism was a benevolent protector of Jews.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Majority Leader Steny Hoyer have gone beyond their disgraceful defense of Tlaib’s grotesque distortions of Middle East history and have decided to rub the electorate’s face in a calculated exercise in bigotry.
And there can be little doubt that this was part of a well-thought-out strategy. Here’s what it is.
PUTIN’S MIDDLE EAST TAR BABY OF FAILURE
Presently, however, the Kremlin’s access is being curtailed: Moscow, for instance, cannot find an entry point into the exploding crisis in Gaza.
Furthermore, Putin clearly disapproves of the removal of President Abdelaziz Bouteflika in Algeria under pressure from street protests.
Similarly, the Russian head of state opposes the ousting of his Sudanese counterpart, Omar al-Bashir, by military coup.
Moscow has been unable to employ any useful assets to make a difference in all three. The war in Yemen is also beyond Russia’s reach.
Everywhere he looks in the Middle East, Putin finds himself stuck in a tar baby of failure.
CHINA’S BRILLIANTLY INSIDIOUS STRATEGY AGAINST AMERICA
The Chinese Communist government does not have so much a strategy to translate its economic ascendance into global hegemony as several strategies. All of them are brilliantly insidious.
China is not Russia. It differs from Russia in underappreciated ways that transcend its obviously vastly greater population, far-larger economy, and ascendant military.
China is patterning its neocolonialist agenda after both the British Empire of the 19th century (without the pretensions of a Western nation’s paternalistic “burden” of spreading civilization) and the Pacific expansionism of Japan’s Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere of the 1930s and 1940s.
This history might explain why Japan, of all its Asian neighbors, knows all too well what China is up to. It’s about time the West knows it just as well.
TRUMP-INVESTIGATING DEMS NEED REHAB
We all know the horrors of addiction—lives destroyed, families shattered. It wrecks the fabric of society. Unfortunately, the Democrats have contracted an extraordinarily virulent form—investigating Donald Trump has become crack cocaine to them with maybe fentanyl and methamphetamine thrown in.
The likes of Jerrold Nadler and Adam Schiff seem to be sucking on this pipe for dear life, day and night, giving them barely time to breathe or eat. Even when getting a rare touch of sleep, these putative public servants clearly have Trump on the brain. They never think of anything else—or, seemingly, do anything else.
And they are far from alone. Legions of Democrats and their media lackeys suffer from the same addiction.
THE BRAINWASHING OF A NATION
Brainwashing isn’t a secretive event that takes place in hidden rooms. No hypnotists or vials full of chemicals are required. It takes place every day on a massive scale across the United States.
Unlike Raymond Shaw in The Manchurian Candidate, brainwashing does not turn people into hypnotized zombies who would be ready to kill a presidential candidate at a command. Instead, it transforms them into the sort of people who would be willing to kill someone for political reasons.
The distinction is why so few people understand the sources of political radicalism and violence. The art and science of brainwashing is well known. We don’t know it because we choose not to.
Here it is explained how the Left has become an evil cult dedicated to brainwashing America.
WE ONLY HAVE THREE AND A HALF DAYS TO STOP CLIMATE CHANGE
Climate change is in the news again. Earlier this year, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (aka Congresswoman Cowfart) warned us that we have only 12 years to address the harm that human beings are doing to the planet. Last week, Beto O’Rourke amended that, suggesting we have only 10 years.
Now, I don’t want to scare anyone, but according to my calculations that I arrived at by reading science, both Beto and Ocasio-Cortez are looking at this problem through rose-colored glasses.
In fact, the world has precisely three and a half days to change its ways or it will basically be destroyed.
As I write this, it is 1:45 pm on Friday May 10th. By sometime in the midmorning on Tuesday May 14th, if we don’t take action, Miami will be underwater, Toledo will be on fire, a swarm of locusts will descend upon Houston, and Brooklyn … well, actually Brooklyn will be fine, but that’s not the point. The point is…
DEMOCRATS ARE DOOMED TO LIVE IN A DESERT OF THEIR OWN CREATION
Guess why this man is smiling
Democrats have grown infuriated by Attorney General William Barr's indifference to their hysteria over the Trump-Russia collusion narrative.
Now Democrats are calling for Barr to resign or be impeached for not regurgitating the unproven allegations against Trump.
In other words, Barr acted too much like a federal prosecutor rather than a tabloid reporter trafficking in allegations that did not amount to criminal conduct.
The besmirching of Barr's conduct is surreal. What accounts for it? All they are getting is Barr smiling back at them. So now what, Dems?
CHINA CAN NO LONGER AFFORD WORLD DOMINATION
Routes of China’s Proposed New Silk Roads
There’s just one flaw in Xi Jinping’s plans for global economic conquest. It’s that China has run out of money. The $8 trillion headline figure for the New Silk Road is romantic fiction.
The Belt and Road – as it has become known since maritime links were added to the original Marco Polo caravan route – is China’s plan of infrastructure development and investments in 152 countries and international organizations. Yes, 152.
It may have made financial sense when China was running a fat current account surplus. This reached 10% of GDP in the final stages of the export boom from 2004 to 2008.
Today, China’s current account surplus has essentially vanished. The International Monetary Fund thinks it will be 0.5% of GDP this year. It will then go progressively negative through the early 2020s.
BEWARE DEMS’ “SUE TILL IT’S BLUE” POWER GRAB
Former President Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder won’t tell the truth when it comes to their redistricting strategy, but here it is: Pick a state, any state, and sue until it’s blue.
They have spent years and millions of dollars selling the false narrative that Democrats draw “fair maps” while any and all Republican-drawn maps are “partisan gerrymanders.”
While rhetorically cute, their primary goal has nothing to do with fighting gerrymandering as they repeatedly claim, but to put redistricting in the hands of unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats and lifetime-appointed judges.
Their strategy makes sense. There are plenty of unelected federal judges presiding over these redistricting cases who will enthusiastically toss out constitutionally drawn maps to help elect more Democrats. Here’s how to stop this.
SHOULD JOURNALISTS GO TO JAIL FOR THEIR SEDITIOUS LIES?
Does she deserve an orange jump suit?
As a First Amendment maximalist, I am inclined to reply an automatic "No" to my own headline — should journalists go to jail for spreading their seditious lies?
But a penalty of some kind, indeed a serious one, should certainly be levied for misinforming the public on the most important subject of our day, which has happened repeatedly over the last few years concerning the Russia probe.
And when these prevarications can be shown to have been deliberate, to have been done knowingly, difficult as that may be to prove, the line to sedition may have been crossed.
Thus there is an argument the reporters involved should face legal consequences. Are they guilty of sedition? Decide for yourselves: read 18 U.S. Code § 2384. Seditious conspiracy.
THE FRIGHT OF COMEY
In a recent New York Times op-ed (5/01), fired FBI Director James Comey was back again preaching to the nation about the dangers of Donald Trump and his capacity to corrupt any top-ranking federal official of lower character than Comey’s own.
Comey seems to have become utterly unhinged by Donald Trump, especially when the president, in his Queens accent, scoffs in the vernacular—quite accurately, given the transgressions of the FBI hierarchy—about “crooked cops.”
What an affront to Comey’s complexity, his subtlety, his sophistication, his feigned Hamlet-like self-doubt—at least as now expressed in his latest incarnation as Twitter’s Kahlil Gibran.
One can say a number of things about the timing of Comey’s latest sermon and his characteristic projection of his own sins on to others. Here they are.
FOR FEAR OF WILLIAM BARR
The only thing uglier than an angry Washington is a fearful Washington. And fear is what’s driving this week’s blitzkrieg of Attorney General William Barr.
Mr. Barr tolerantly sat through hours of Democrat insults at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing Wednesday (5/01). His reward for his patience was to be labeled, in the space of a news cycle, a lawbreaking, dishonest, obstructing hack.
Yet the attorney general delivered the transparency Democrats demanded: He quickly released a lightly redacted report, which portrayed the president in a negative light.
What do Democrats have to object to? Some of this is frustration, some of this is personal, some of this is bitterness. But most of it is fear.
DEM DESPERATION ON DISPLAY IN DEMONIZING THE ATTORNEY GENERAL
They smeared him, called him a liar and said he should resign. The same Senate Democrats on the Judiciary Committee who tried to assassinate the character of Judge Brett Kavanaugh last year pulled the same stunt on Bill Barr — with the same result.
They failed because, once again, they were throwing mud while shooting blanks.
Despite the Dems’ desperate efforts to derail Kavanaugh’s nomination with false accusations, he is now on the Supreme Court. Barr was obviously prepared for his mud bath and was unflappable in the face of Wednesday’s mean-spirited assault, proving himself to be a rock-solid attorney general.
As he said at his confirmation hearing, “I won’t be bullied,” and he wasn’t. Now they’ve poked the tiger – very big mistake.
HILLARY PROJECTION SYNDROME
Hillary Clinton recently editorialized about the second volume of special counsel Robert Mueller’s massive report.
She concluded of the report’s assorted testimonies and inside White House gossip concerning President Trump’s words and actions that “any other person engaged in those acts would certainly have been indicted.”
Psychologists might call her claims “projection.” That is the well-known psychological malady of attributing bad behavior to others as a means of exonerating one’s own similar, if not often even worse, sins.
Psychologist might then conclude her projection means she’s very worried about the certainty of being indicted herself.