After the Coup is Gone

By Julie Kelly 
http://www.ruthfullyyours.com/2019/02/15/after-the-coup-is-gone-by-julie-kelly/              
February 15th, 2019          
     
As the perpetrators of one of the most shameful scandals in American political history begin slowly to retreat, we are left to ponder one overarching question:

What now?

The tale we’ve been told for more than two years—that Donald Trump’s campaign team, possibly even the candidate himself, colluded with the Kremlin to influence the outcome of the 2016 presidential election—has been exposed as a lie. Various investigations into this alleged conspiracy are coming up empty and the accomplices are trying to change the subject. Even more pathetically, some still are clinging to the farce, desperate to salvage whatever still remains of their already sketchy credibility.

To describe it as a witch hunt, the president’s preferred term, is too generous. The American public has witnessed a seditious attempt by powerful interests garrisoned throughout our political complex to overthrow a sitting U.S. president. The orchestrated and failed coup has exceeded the routine combat of our two-party system, where out-of-power partisans disrupt and agitate the other side. No, this has been a full scale insurrection that has violated the boundaries of law, normalcy, and civility in an unprecedented way.

Both Democrats and Republicans have been complicit. The national news media have acted as hatchet men. Influential public officials, operating both inside and outside of government, have aided the stratagem. One of the main culprits just revealed—no, bragged—how a handful of corrupt bureaucrats plotted unlawfully to remove the president from the Oval Office based on the fantastical scheme.

It’s the kind of treachery that is supposed to animate banana republics or Soviet-style regimes—not our country.

And now that the Senate Intelligence Committee confirmed this week that their two-year investigation—which involved the interrogation of 200 witnesses and a review of 300,000 documents—will find no evidence of collusion, the aftermath of this scandal is coming into view. How it plays out is anyone’s guess at this point, but one thing is evident: There is deep rage at what has happened not just to this president but to this country—and people want answers.

On his show Tuesday night, Tucker Carlson unleashed a tirade that reflected the anger felt by millions of Americans. “In the end, it was all fake, and they knew it wasn’t real, they knew they were lying,” Carlson said after playing a series of clips by Democratic leaders accusing the president of colluding with the Russians. “We’ve spent two years perpetuating a fraud and they are still doing it. What is it? It’s negligence on a stunning scale. Historians will look back on this moment in amazement and sadness. Why didn’t any responsible person in the media say anything about it, why did they collude in the charade?”

Carlson unloaded on House Intelligence Committee chairman Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), one of the key conspirators from the beginning, insisting that Skiff's grandchildren “will be ashamed of what he did.” Perhaps they will. But only if his progeny have more integrity and decency than Schiff does which, I admit, sets a very low bar.

The cast of villains in this national nightmare is long. At the highest echelon is the Obama White House; to date, no one knows how involved the former president was in executing this scheme because not one journalist has yet confronted Obama about what he knew or when he knew it. Think about that for a moment. Barack Obama’s Justice Department weaponized federal law enforcement and intelligence powers to infiltrate and spy on a rival presidential campaign then leveraged that same authority after the election to raze an incoming administration, yet not one member of the press corps has asked him one question about it.

Former administration officials who pulled all the strings, including ex-FBI Director James Comey, ex-CIA Director John Brennan and ex-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper continue to attack the president, even accusing Trump of being a traitor and a Russian asset. Members of both the Obama and Bush administrations have become media celebrities by legitimizing the collusion fantasy on cable news shows and opinion pages. NeverTrump Republicans who long ago should have been run out of the public square for their consistently-wrong analysis on nearly every political and policy issue over the past two decades have earned earn rock-star status on social media from Democrats and liberals eager to exploit  their nonstop rants about Trump-Russia as proof “even Republicans” are suspicious.

Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have diverted time, money, and attention away from critical issues that matter to Americans in order to chase after a ruse that most, if not all, knew was a head fake from the start. It will be impossible to measure how many opportunities to fix illegal immigration or health care or entitlement reform over the past two years were lost while our political leaders across the country were mired in a nonexistent crisis. And probably that was the point. The Justice Department has diverted needed resources to a special counsel probe that has nothing to do with the safety and security of the American people.
Meanwhile, Robert Mueller’s investigation has not yielded one indictment related to collusion, yet it has wrecked countless reputations and livelihoods. Gutless elected officials have cowered in the presence of representatives from this ostensible fourth branch of government while Trump-Russia propagandists demand that every politician swear his allegiance and fealty to the almighty and unaccountable Robert Mueller. Any hint of disagreement with the special counsel is portrayed as either cowardice or insubordination.

But no entity has acted more recklessly and destructively than the national news media. From publishing illegally leaked information intended to destroy anyone in Trump’s orbit to ambushing elderly supporters of Donald Trump, the media have defiled their industry to a degree that will be unrecoverable. False reporting has been corrected quietly (when it is corrected at all) and without any consequence.
Sex-for-Trump-Russia-Scoop arrangements result in promotions.


Consider these numbers: Since May 2017, the New York Times has cited the Mueller investigation 4,392 times and posted nearly 1,200 articles, columns and editorials about Russian collusion since January 2017. The Washington Post has cited Robert Mueller 4,162 times and posted 1,100 pieces about Russian collusion just in the past 12 months. CNN has devoted more than 3,000 articles and news segments to Robert Mueller since he was appointed. Those are just the results of a few cursory searches.


But we will never know the total amount of air time, column inches and social media chatter that have been dedicated to a fabricated conspiracy peddled by a media infrastructure desperate to believe it was true and maliciously trying to convince the public of a lie in a vain attempt to satiate their own appetite for political revenge against Donald Trump.

So, what now? Who will pay the price for unleashing this ordeal on the American public? Which lawmaker will
be rebuked and censured for pretending to have evidence of malfeasance that never happened? Which former high level official will be charged for abuse of power?

What journalist will be fired and permanently jettisoned from the industry for intentionally misleading readers and viewers? What editor or media owner will be held accountable for publishing illegally leaked information that exacted real harm on innocent people? When will NeverTrumperers who accused more astute observers of this scheme of being “conspiracy theorists” going to apologize?

How will people harassed by the media and investigators restore their professional standing, squandered savings and mental wellbeing? How can the president regain the time in his term that has been lost to this craven insurgency?

These are only a handful of the questions now arising from the wreckage of the failed Trump-Russia collusion gambit; the answers might be just as infuriating as the questions themselves.

Donald Trump’s Annihilation of the Democratic Party

By Conrad Black
https://amgreatness.com/2019/02/06/donald-trumps-annihilation-of-the-democratic-party/
February 6, 2019 

The nadir of the amoral egotism of what might broadly be called “Me-ism” has been reached by the avant garde of the Democratic Party in their race to the bottom of the electoral depths. The renunciation of any notions of sacrifice, patriotic pride, the spirituality of life, or the recognition of anything except the smash-and-grab politics of endless atomized grievances and instant gratification of convenience, has reached what must, in its way, be the end of history.

The governor of Virginia, Ralph Northam, a pediatric neurologist, led the way downwards with an unctuous statement on the virtues of delivering children, assuring their survival as live babies, and then determining in discussion with the mother (of course) whether they deserved to be allowed to survive.

This was an attitude that appalled a large section of opinion in 5th century B.C. Athens. In espousing it, far more than the utter moral vacuity of the cutting edge of the Democratic Party has been exposed. When running for governor, Northam called his opponent a racist and President Trump a “narcissistic maniac.”

The Bigger Fight

The informal, spontaneous, emergent strategy of the Democrats is finally erupting and foaming from the mouths and nostrils of their legislators and candidates in a mighty outburst of opportunistic consciousness. This is a delayed reaction to the destruction of their monopoly on political power by the Trump phenomenon, compounded by the recognition that Trump can’t be impeached and will do everything he promised if he can get a firm enough grip on the apparatus of political power.


The supreme struggle for the commanding heights of American politics, the battle of Verdun or of Stalingrad, has come over immigration. The decades-old understanding between machine Democrats vacuuming up easy Latino votes and largely Republican employers exploiting the cheap labor of illegal Latino immigrants enabled Donald Trump to forge a new coalition of the threatened working class, the middle class exhausted by more than a decade of flat-lined purchasing power, the silent majority of disinterested patriotic Americans, and the legitimate immigrants who do not want their ability to climb the socio-economic ladder as American immigrants have done for 240 years to be undercut by swarms of illegal migrants with no sense of choosing a new country and determining to accept that country’s values and work within them.

Democrats rejoice in proclaiming that Trump didn’t drain much of the swamp when the Republicans controlled the White House and both houses of Congress. They know perfectly well that the Republicans in the Congress were NeverTrumpers. The only senator Trump had at the outset was the subsequently hopeless attorney general, Jeff Sessions, who could not have done more to assist the cover-up of Democratic skullduggery if he had co-authored the Steele dossier.

Now Trump has banished the worst of the Never Trumpers from the congressional Republican delegation, and won the rest over by friendly persuasion—except for Mitt Romney, who virtually terminated his useful career as a senator two days before he was sworn in with an article on the president’s character. The piece confirmed about Romney what his predecessor from Utah, Orrin Hatch, had called him: “a well-oiled weather vane.” It showed, too, that he was a treacherous one. Despite Romney and the chronically bumptious Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), Trump’s allies are now in control of the Senate and its committees and the unearthing of the misconduct of the Obama Justice Department, intelligence services, and the Clinton campaign—as the attorney general-designate has pledged—are about to begin.


Democrats Backed Into a Corner

The Democratic House of Representatives has taken its stand on immigration. Led by Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), they claim to favor border security but are reluctant to do anything to reduce the flow of illegal immigrants. The entire Democratic media echo chamber has gone to maximum decibel levels denouncing the time-honored solution of an “immoral” wall, and claiming the problem is wildly exaggerated and chiefly occurs at airports. They are backing themselves into the corner of “sanctuary cities” where police are instructed to ignore federal immigration laws and census-takers are enjoined from asking the citizenship of the country’s residents, as the Constitution requires.

This is insurrection and the pervasion of the immigration question, around 20 million people who entered the United States illegally, has corrupted the Democratic Party as its leaders balk at rational solutions. These include the establishment of a border, the deportation of serious law-breakers illegally present in the United States, a generous treatment for the people who entered blamelessly as children, and an expedited path to citizenship for the great majority of illegal entrants who have been constructive and law-abiding residents.
With battle joined on immigration, the Democrats have lashed out at the rich, including the close pals of the Clintons and Obamas in Wall Street and Hollywood, and are calling for a return to pre-LBJ, almost World War II-level tax rates, (of the confiscatory levels that drove Ronald Reagan into the Republican Party). La Pasionaria of the movement, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), and the modern Herbert Marcuse, Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), are both calling for top tax rates in the neighborhood of 70 percent. Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris, junior U.S. senator from California, surged to the fore by calling for the nationalization of the entire health insurance industry, and, effectively of the entire gigantic field of health care. Never mind single-payer healthcare, this is no-payer health care. Doctors of America would become de facto federal employees.

Exalting Atrocities

The Democratic train is now roaring off the tracks and down the third rail which politicians used not to touch, out of a lingering sense of self-preservation. The logical coruscation of this dispersal—this flight from the political center to the left, to stage a goal-line stand of the die-hards against the Trump ogre, grinding relentlessly forward, heedless of the semi-daily announcements by most of the national media of his imminent collapse in legal shambles, is to repurpose abortion as the end of the policy rainbow.

Abortion is too intrusive, too inconvenient; let the children be born and then the mother can decide whether she wants to be a mother after all, or kill the child, or give it up for adoption.

This was the logical end of the nonsensical Roe v. Wade decision that childbirth is exclusively a matter of a woman’s control over her body: it decided correctly that the state does not have the power and should not seek the power to inflict childbirth on a woman who does not want to have a child. But it ignored the real question of when the unborn attain to the rights of a person. That is why the decision is vulnerable and the Democrats, in cold terror that it could be overturned, are in panic and are moving the battle-lines forward to the position of Ralph Northam, far from a natural oracle of moral opinion this past week.

To hell with control over their own bodies! Women will decide in post-natal calm whether to kill the child. It is to this unspeakable assault on every principle and value that has guided, inspired, and undergirded American civilization, where the Democrats are arriving at their last post.

#MeToo was justice by denunciation. Senator and presidential candidate Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) said Dr. Christine Blasey Ford had to be believed over Judge Brett Kavanaugh because she was a woman. Senator Susan Collins (R-Maine) saved the balance of evidence and of probabilities, and rebutted justice by mere unsubstantiated denunciation. The Democrats are moving on: women will not only cause the rejection of male candidates for high positions, but have them prosecuted, which in the corrupt American justice system in 95 percent of cases means imprisoned. For good measure, the warrior-queen sisterhood will also decide, after birth, whether their children will be allowed to survive. Life is not remotely sacred, it is to be encouraged if convenient and snuffed out if not.

A Frenzy of Extremism

Donald Trump’s greatest achievement may be the total annihilation of the Democratic Party in its present mutated and degraded form. The Democrats have been allowed to slither to their present state of moral degradation with the witless and spineless collaboration of look-alike Republicans who are easy to defeat, like McCain and Romney, or can be survived, like Reagan and the Bushes, or destroyed, like Nixon.

Faced with a Trump they could not defeat and cannot destroy, Democrats appear to be entering a frenzy of primal extremism. If the Democrats go to the voters next year as the party of infanticide, open borders, a 70 percent top personal income tax rate, and the practical abolition of private health care, they will vanish more quickly, and with less distinction, than the Whigs, who at least had serious leaders like Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, and Abraham Lincoln before their party imploded. This thronging riff-raff of Democratic presidential aspirants couldn’t lead the country across Washington’s Francis Scott Key Bridge, and won’t get an invitation to try.