Posse Incitatus

The Democrat panic over declassification

Being a Democrat means never having to say your sorry.

It's funny how the same people who were demanding that grand jury testimony be (illegally) made public are now in a lather over Attorney General Robert Barr obtaining full declassification authority from President Trump.

Which is it, Dems, do you want the truth or not?

Old and busted:  "WE NEED ALL THE THINGS MADE PUBLIC!!!"

New hotness:  "NATIONAL SECURITY SOURCES AND METHODS!!!  KEEP IT ALL SECRET!1!"

The current Dem drive for impeachment can best be understood as a spoiling attack to muddy the waters.  It may get some headlines, but ultimately it will fail because the votes simply aren't there and criminal convictions speak louder than spin.

And that's what worries them.  Barr is a seasoned, shrewd lawyer.  He's going to build air-tight cases that likely won't even need to be prosecuted.

As I've noted before, there is zero loyalty in the modern Democrat machinery.  None of these people are going to jail to cover for someone else.  The public finger-pointing between James Comey and John Brennan is merely a glimpse of the deal-making going on in private.

I'm not one of those demanding life imprisonment for those involved.   It's not necessary.  Even a couple of months in prison will spell personal and professional ruin for these people.  They are lifelong bureaucrats with no other skills.  Having their security clearance pulled and a felony in their record will wreck them.

That's why they are desperate to cut a deal - and so shrill in their attempts to change the subject.

May finally out - UK's worst prime minister ever?

Theresa May has finally announced her resignation, ending one of the most sordid and disgraceful governments in British history.

I say this as a student of UK government.  When people think of awful prime ministers, Neville Chamberlain frequently comes to mind, but while Chamberlain's foreign policy was disastrous, he didn't undermine the core values and rights of the British people.

May has done exactly that.  Her nominally "conservative" government has turned a blind eye to rape gangs, stood helplessly as violent crime has surged and instead wastes police resources on censoring people's social media accounts.

Her political prosecution of Tommy Robinson is a national disgrace to the Sceptered Isle.

Electorally, he's wrecked her party and undermined public faith in the government itself.  She lied about holding a snap-election and then lost it.  She lied about implementing Brexit and then lied about its timetable.  

The Tories have lost their way and Nigel Farage's Brexit Party may be the only hope to rebuild British liberty.  

Set against these follies, Chamberlain looks pretty good by comparison.  When he reluctantly stepped aside, his successor faced a dire strategic situation, but at least could look with hope and confidence at the core institutions and society of the United Kingdom.  May's successor won't have that luxury.  Virtually every institution stands discredited.

Good riddens.

BONUS ANGLE:  Her ouster will likely free Donald Trump of any reluctance to expose British involvement in Spygate, particularly collusion between CIA and CGHQ.  I can't help but wonder if Trump's declassification order might have been a factor.

The progressive pharisees of National Review

It’s pretty well established that much of the left substitutes politics for religion.  What they lack in faith they make up for in ideology, which is why someone who disagrees with them on an issue is not merely wrong but objectively evil.

A leftist who urges a policy change flirts with heresy.

All of this has been true for a long time.

What is not as well known is that a certain brand of conservative has likewise substituted religion for politics.  Just as leftists see policy preferences as a path of secular salvation, these conservatives see religious preferences as a path of policy guidance – and people who disagree are (as in the above example) not merely wrong but objectively evil.

Similarly, those on their own side who don’t share their beliefs are heretics to be chastised and burned, not reasoned with.

I was too busy last week to write about this, but National Review-sponsored Quisling Never Trumper David French (and his wife) have been on a roll lately, denouncing their nominal political allies and co-religionists for supporting Donald Trump instead of (wait for it) Mitt Romney, that paragon of defeatist virtue.

The increasingly indispensable American Greatness has an excellent summary and rejoinder to French and his fellow Calvinist scolds (no really, French has used John Calvin as his Twitter avatar – no pretension there!) by Chris Buskirk.  It’s very much worth a read, but Buskirk misses the essential basis for French’s argument, which is that actual results are immaterial, what is important is the purity of one’s beliefs.

This is the mirror image of the left’s obsession with virtue-signaling.  For example, the left doesn’t care if gun control works, it is a moral imperative – or as they like to say: “Who we are.”

The same goes for open borders, tolerating violence (and excrement) on the street, and dozens of other policies that harm the people they are supposed to save.

Again, this has long been known, but it’s not until now that I realized why the Quisling Never Trumpers are equally indifferent to the suffering of the people they are supposed to be helping.  This is why Kevin Williamson’s infamous response to rural decline was to tell people to learn to code, or give up their good-paying manufacturing or mining job to be a greeter at Wal Mart.

Williamson’s callousness is essential to his moral conception of himself because virtue-signaling is all that matters.  Just like Hillary, the Never Trumpers regard the working classes as “deplorable,” whose individual well-being is less important than their salvation through suffering.

Another similarity between the FredoCons and their erstwhile enemies is their use of identity politics. 

Just as a progressive has to list all their qualifiers (gay, trans, ethnic, sexual) before speaking, David French likes to remind everyone that he’s an “Iraq War veteran” and that one of his three children was adopted.

Frankly, I think it’s pretty low to run around bragging about an adopted child as if it’s a trophy or resume item.  I’ve also noted many times that French was no Audie Murphy – he served as a lawyer, not an actual soldier.  (Indeed, JAG officers don’t even have to go through basic training.)

Now a cynic might also note that like his progressive counterparts, French figures he personally will never suffer hardship for his policies.  That’s for the impure.

One might further note that someone is paying French and his co-religionists a lot of money to hector their erstwhile allies.  Again, like progressivism it is a grift, but one that makes the recipients feel good about themselves.

Certainly Jonah Goldberg has been banging this drum for three years, demanding that people name Trump’s virtues and then ignoring the answers.  There’s a point where this repetition crosses the line from willfully obtuse to simply cashing a paycheck for hectoring religious people.

Perhaps the biggest indictment I can levy against these would-be pharisees is the fact that for all their moral sermonizing, they’re not only comfortable with putting far worse sinners in charge, but have zero problem spreading lies and slanders of their own in pursuit of the cause.

None of these people hesitated at all to spread the obviously fake dossier and they spent years passing taking hits from the same RUSSIA conspiracy bong that the Democrats were hitting so heavily.

Trump's trade war isn't hurting growth, it's causing it

As if record-low unemployment isn’t enough, President Trump’s economic team is now moving to hit even more Chinese good with hefty tariffs.

According the Chamber of Commerce types, this is a disaster for the common man.  They continue to pitch the Free Trade Lie that tariffs are always and everywhere an unmitigated evil and that allowing countries with distorted economies access to our markets is an unalloyed good.

In truth, tariffs are morally neutral and their utility varies upon the circumstance.  A protective tariff is not only appropriate but necessary when another nation undertakes predatory trading practices. 

Yet the Quisling Never Trumpers and their globalist allies continue to spread the falsehood that boosting the cost of cut-rate consumer goods assembled by slave labor in unsafe and heavily polluting factories is somehow a crime against the free market.

They give the game away when they announce that “American consumers” will pay the heaviest costs.

Nope.  China will.

Consider a tariff that raises the price of toasters by a couple of dollars.  Will that crush the wallets of American workers?  Hardly.  But that incremental increase changes the production curve so that American workers and factories now become more profitable than overseas locations.  This in turn boosts American prosperity and cuts the trade deficit.

Now consider the counter-example, which we lived through for decades:  Toasters get a little cheaper, but the plant employing hundreds of workers has now closed.  So does the steel mill, and the ore mine.

All the businesses that served those workers go next, and soon we are in a downward spiral of collapsing tax revenue, rising welfare costs and increased crime and drug abuse.

This is the world that paid shills like Jonah Goldberg have tried to convince us we want to live in.  It is a world that benefits the elite and crushes everyone else.

Protection for American industry from foreign competition and higher wages for American wages are bedrock principles of the Republican Party dating back to Abraham Lincoln.  It’s strange that so many True Conservatives have turned their backs on them.

What states will the Dems flip by embracing gun confiscation?

When one gets down to it, the core challenge of taking on an incumbent president is simply this:  How can you flip enough states to secure victory.

Donald Trump chose to target the Rust Belt in his quest for the White House and his strategy paid off handsomely.

The path to defeat him therefore requires the Democrat challenger to win back the blue-collar voters that shifted to Trump from Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Ohio.

Ominously for the Dems, Ohio seems out of reach.  Trump won handily there and the GOP remains strong.  The others are still in play, yet every Democrat candidate seems to be competing for the title of Worst Gun-Grabber.

 All of these states have "Shall issue" concealed carry laws - duly enacted by the elected politicians and preserved by the will of the voters.  

Yet the Democrats want to nullify these laws on the federal level and introduce outright confiscation.  This will win them new voters?

Richard Nixon famously advised candidates to go to the extreme during the primaries and then return to the center for the general election, but there's no turning back from some of these radical proposals.

A collective madness seems to have descended upon the Democrats.  The only rational response is to hammer them at the polls like its 1984.

The Rule of Law returns to Massachusetts

It's fascinating to see how our political parties are returning to their historical roots.

Trump's GOP is once again in favor of raising the wages of American workers and protecting American industry.  This goes back to the foundation of the party.  When Quisling Never Trumpers whine about Trump being unprecedented, they're lying.  What was unprecedented was the GOP deciding to support endless immigration and de-industrialization.

Meanwhile, the Democrats are once again embracing nullification as a response to federal laws they don't like.  The most egregious case is the Massachusetts state judge who actually smuggled a federal fugitive out of her court room to avoid his arrest by a waiting federal agent.

Naturally, the usual suspects (ACLU, other state officials) are outraged that a JUDGE is being held accountable for violating federal law.  What is the world coming to!  Judges are supposed to be part of the aristocracy and therefore immune from legal consequences for their actions.

This article has a link to the indictment, which spells out just how duplicitous the judge and her court officers were.  They even went to the extreme of shutting off the court recording camera so they could hatch their criminal conspiracy in privacy.

I've seen some deluded souls argue that helping a repeat offender escape is somehow like helping Anne Frank escape the Nazis.

Uh, no.

In the first case, they guy had already been deported twice.  For the analogy to hold, the Frank family would have had to repeatedly invade Nazi-occupied territory - the exact opposite of what is happening here.

The modern left has convinced itself that the purity of their intentions should shield them from any negative consequences of their actions.

Not only is this morally abhorrent, in practice it will destroy civilization because it breaks the crucial link between cause and effect.

Happily, there are still a few adults who understand this.  Strange that for all the venom directed at Trump, he's the most adult person in Washington.

About that Trump recession...

It must be tough being Paul Krugman.

Sure, he's probably got a good income, and there are a bunch of beta-boys who seem to hang on his every word.

But he's also wrong almost all the time.  After a while, it doesn't matter how many titles you've accumulated, when push comes to shove you're still a Former Enron Advisor who blows almost every prediction.

Strangely, Donald Trump's economic team seems to be on a hot streak.  It's interesting to contrast the steadiness and competence of this group compared to other parts of the administration.  Still, one can't find fault with the results.

I've said it before, but it bears repeating:  The recession of 2009 didn't end until Trump took office.

Oh, the statisticians cranked out numbers and claimed the economy was growing, but that growth was dwarfed by the increase in the federal debt.  

What Trump's team has done is unleash all that aggregate demand and it is continuing to surge forward.  The US has almost an entire decade of growth to make up, which is why things are going to boom for a while.

Not only that, Trump is changing the rules of the game, bringing manufacturing jobs home.  Those jobs in turn create even more jobs and small towns across the country are seeing the kind of economic revivals we were assured by the likes of Kevin Williamson could never happen.

This is Trump's strongest argument for re-election and one he will hit home again and again.  Whoever he is up against is going to face the question of how many jobs they want to export to Mexico or China.  No amount of smoke-blowing will obscure that fact.

Trump is the worst anti-Semite ever

The left has pretty much given up on argument or debate.  All they have left is smears, and nowhere is the more apparent than in their constant howling that Donald Trump is a racist/sexist/RUSSIAN/anti-Semite.

This high-decibel howling can work for a while, but there comes a point where reality intervenes and then the press looks really, really stupid.

Like now.

It was always stupid for the Democrats to try to play the anti-Semite card on Trump - after all, his daughter converted to to the Jewish faith and his grandchildren are observant Jews.

Hitler this guy is not.

He's also been the best friend Israel has had since Harry Truman.  He moved the US embassy to Jerusalem, has steadfastly supported the Jewish state (reversing Obama's passive-aggressive stance) and recently recognized Israel's legal right to hold the strategic Golan Heights.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has acknowledged this by calling for a town in the Golan to be named after Trump.

You know, because Trump is such a Jew-hater.

This rote howling and throwing of insults reminds me of the old Soviet Union, where ritual denunciations were commonplace.  I remember being able to do a nice riff (in a Russian accent, of course) where I'd denounce the "imperialist, fascist government of the United States and its running dog lackey European allies."

Maybe you had to be there, but the point was that the insults were pathetic because they were so hollow.

So it is with Trump hatred and the pathetic lie that he isn't the most pro-Jewish president of my lifetime.

Of course, the Dems are desperate to maintain their grip on the Jewish vote, just like they need to convince black people that Trump is a latter-day Klansman.

At some point, however, you'd think these people would come up with something that was so self-evidently stupid.

You'd think that, but you'd be wrong.

With the Mueller Report out of the way, Trump can finally act

The release of the Mueller report is shockingly anti-climactic.  One would expect that there would be at least one shocking revelation contained within its 400+ pages, but almost every episode, suspect and incident has been in the public domain for two years.

This makes the Democrat insistence on maintaining the Collusion Delusion that much more inexplicable.  Time was, Democrat politicians would recognize when the trade winds were against them and adjust their sails accordingly.

Now they’re only play is to double-down and push more chips onto ever weaker hands.  The current talking point – demanding to see redactions required by law – is pathetically weak.

The real action is yet to come.  Mueller’s investigation was always a delaying tactic and desperate attempt to catch Trump in a process crime.  To his credit, he didn’t take the bait and none of his close aides did, either.

That fact alone should destroy the “Trump White House in Chaos!1!” meme, but of course it won’t because the media is incapable of reform.  It is stuck on stupid.

With Mueller now out of the way, it will be interesting to see where the Attorney General goes next.  Rod Rosenstein’s usefulness has expired and I suspect he was retained on condition of giving up each and every one of his colleagues.  His demeanor has that “I’ll be good,” look of someone who entered into a sealed cooperation agreement and is determined to see it executed fully.

Indeed, the big question to my mind is when the indictments start flying.  We know criminal referrals have been submitted and others are on the way.  It will be particularly interesting if reporters who trafficked in classified information will also face charges.  We know from the IG report that extensive bribes were offered to FBI officials in return for leaks.

Sundance at the Conservative Treehouse rendered his blog virtually unreadable because no charges were immediately filed, but he ignored the fact that Mueller was in the way.  I wonder how many of those so compromised were hiding on his team under the theory that charging them for their crimes would be the long-sought obstruction?

But all that's over, gone with the wind.  It's Trump's move now.  I'm interested to see what he does.

The Trump Economy

Now that RUSSIA is unwinding, it's interesting to see how Trump's economic policies are helping Main Street Americans.

Economic growth continues to surge while unemployment is cratering.  Not only that, but real wages are rising for the first time in many years.

Strangely, the Federal Reserve took this to mean that inflation was imminent.  The fact that actual wage growth can be misinterpreted in this way speaks volumes about the prejudices of the managerial elites.  They take it as a given that wages should be flat or in decline and that the American economy will be services-oriented from now on.  It cannot enter their Ivy League-brainwashed skulls that by altering trade agreements and slowing immigration, the US economy can both create a resurgence in manufacturing AND raise worker pay.

This is going to make a big difference come election time.  Many of the plant expansions that started last year are only now nearly completion.  By next spring, a new wave of vocational school graduates will be happily making good money at those plants, undermining the traditional Democrat control of the "youth vote."

Indeed, the Dem candidates are continuing to indulge in a terminal virtue cycle that can only end with their self-immolation.  Racial reparations, post-birth abortion, gun confiscation, open borders - it's hard to find a single position these people hold that doesn't command massive majority opposition.

Of course, not all sectors of the economy are booming.  The Quisling Never Trump niche seems to be profoundly overcrowded at the moment and I'm curious as to whether National Review will go down like it rival or purge its ranks ala Red State.  Jonah Goldberg's departure may be a harbinger of things to come.