In Iowahawk’s deathless phrase regarding the establishment press, “Journalism is about covering important stories. With a pillow, until they stop moving.” Here it is a weekend and a couple of working days after the release of the notorious and long-awaited FISA memo, and the relatively conservative side of the blogosphere is still happily chewing it over. Doubtless the professional national media wishes the whole matter would just go away already, just because. Frankly, the whole matter reminds me of the swiftboat veterans and the matter of John Kerry’s service in Vietnam.
For weeks before the mainstream establishment media deigned to notice the whole kerfuffle, the blogosphere was a-bubble with discussions of how Kerry had gamed his tour in Vietnam and made his political bones afterwards by being prominent anti-war protestor – to the disgust of those who had served with him. (As an officer and gentleman, Kerry looks to have been an unlovely combination of Frank Burns and a grown-up Eddie Haskell.) And the establishment national media desperately put their fingers in their ears and sang la-la-la-la, no doubt wishing passionately that the whole thing would go away … but it didn’t. Eventually, they had to come to grips with the fact John Kerry’s comrades during his truncated tour of duty felt they had been maligned and insulted by his subsequent antics. The media did manage to twist the phrase ‘swiftboating’ into having another meaning entirely, but it didn’t win Kerry the White House, so we got off lucky in that event.
The corrupting of the FBI is a hundred times worse than John Kerry’s cynical attempts at burnishing his military service for higher office, in my opinion. He was, is, and remains a tone-deaf, clueless fool, notable for charmless ineptitude, a legend in his own mind. The weaponizing of a national crime-investigating agency against a political opponent is a far more serious affair. Here we have a shady oppo-research outfit, working up a bespoke but unproven suit of slime, paid for by partisan political interests, passing it surreptitiously to friends in the establishment media … and to the FBI, to use as justification for spying on a political opponent’s campaign. This is the kind of scummy political shenanigans which distinguishes Third World banana republics, where the president-for-life’s cousin owns the biggest newspaper/television station in the country, and his brother-in-law runs the national police force, and no one, by god, had better get in the way of the president-for-life’s stranglehold on the body politic. The parties who enabled this whole sordid farrago have got to be brought to account – and brought to account in a manner that stings, and demonstrates to the public that there are penalties to be paid for reducing this proud republic to the level of some third world hellhole.
As long as we are still talking about this, blogging about it, commenting on the mainstream media’s comment threads, passing around the word on social media, the issue is still on the table. The national establishment media may wish like hell that it would all go away, but as long as we still have the soap-box, the ballot box and the other boxes … we cannot let this matter pass. Discuss.
They can only wish the shoe was on the other foot, but that is not the case. With the top tiers of both DOJ and FBI thoroughly compromised, the action levers are few and blunt. So far, the public reaction seems to be muted (at least compared to mine).
Interesting drama on the dems attempt at a dossier/FISA memo. Seems like they are daring Trump to withhold it based on it containing all the revelations of sources, contacts and methods they alleged that the Nunes’ memo would divulge (but did not, other than the ones they shouild not have employed). This is likely to look a lot like a blacked out sheet of paper once the redactions are posted. Then they get to fill in the blanks with whatever they like in response to the penetrating, insightful questions of the MSM (such as “When did Trump stop conspiring with the Russians to penetrate our election process?”), lots of winks, nods and un-named sources to be reflected upon.
Where was and is Barry in all this? Didn’t he have to be in the know? How about all those security advisors that are now taking pot shots as private citizens. I don’t think they realize that they are playing the role of pop up targets. As the IG and subsequent memos roll out, theyb will be more and more exposed. But who is pressing the legal measures? Some of this is criminal no matter what “is” means.
Death6
(As an officer and gentleman, Kerry looks to have been an unlovely combination of Frank Burns and a grown-up Eddie Haskell.)
Love it.
On Kerry – didn’t he award himself some medals? Purple hearts?
What happened to the concept of honor with him?
I think the media has to contend with the Internet – something they didn’t worry about during Vietnam. Still rankles me to think what Cronkite did to the country during Tet.
The millennials aren’t reading newspapers but the blogs. The newspaper editors will say with somlee justification that the quality of reporting is all over the map – but then the same could be said about them.
Interesting times.
Thank you, Bill – I sometimes do stumble onto an apt comparison. He is, indeed, a charmless sack of scum. Not even Emperor Barack the 1st didn’t quite have the nerve to name him as secretary of defense … he had to settle with following Hillary’s clumsy footsteps at State.
Oh, the establishment media hates the blogosphere, with the hatred of a thousand burning suns, for persistently wrecking their lovely narrative. Look at how many of them have either taken to curating their comment threads on stories, or dropped comments altogether. And the fallout from the Jordan Peterson interview was marvelous to behold. That silly tw*t of an interviewer assumed that he was just another dumb conservative, and that he would crumble under her righteous social justice warrior questioning … and instead, she got her head and other essential parts handed to her. Live. On TV.
I grew up on military bases in the late Cold War era. John Kerry was on a level just below Jane Fonda. It’s amazing that the MSM pretended, and still pretend to this day, that he was a previously universally adored hero slandered by political opportunists. He was and is garbage, from his time trashing Vietnam vets to his cheerleading the Sandinistas to helping force through the execrable Iran deal.
Everything about the MSM and the Dems for the past year and a half is preposterously stupid. We can only hope that the internet crazies are right and the DOJ IG report is going to blow everything wide open. Even then, I think that there’s too many people who are too far gone. The cognitive dissonance about who exactly is behind the attempts to implement a police state is going to be too much for them, they’ll never accept it. Trump is Emmanuel Goldstein, period.
Kerry was really a traitor as he negotiated with the NVA while still an officer in the Navy.
I would like to see his original discharge, which was rewritten by Carter. His medal certificates are all reissued after the pardons.
It would be interesting to see them.
Sgt Mom,
The media is inside the Leftist bubble. But even Leftist social media bubble isn’t enough to suppress internet delivered stories if they attract eyes.
All the Mainstream Media can do is deny themselves the attention traffic and screw their own credibility for their excesses.
The rise of the Alt-Right is very much aligned with the Left’s construction of their social media bubble, because to penetrate it the new generation are becoming “Meme-lords” to get their views across.
The Left’s “info-bubble” is a hot house plant that cannot stand the cold reality outside the glass and the “Meme-lords” specialize in throwing rocks.
Then there is the “Goad-Emperor” and “Intergalactic Overlord class Meme-Troll” AKA as President Trump who has shown that you can not only troll the Left. You can make them pay for your media because the eyes you generate are irresistible internet traffic drivers.
Trump doesn’t throw rocks. He drops dinosaur killer class meme-asteroids the resets the “Overton Window” more and more “Crime-think” American common sense, long banished from university campuses world wide.
Trump is using his meme-asteroid to drive this Deep State corruption through the media like a bulldozer through a glass hot house.
It is all Battlespace preparation for the massive firings and prosecutions the Left’s internal security thug-o-cracy to come,
I’d say it’s battlespace prep for the November elections.The Left’s internal security thug-o-cracy has been defanged, though the show trials are yet to come, starting in, say, September. The fun part will be when the US Marshalls perp walk Comey.
>>The fun part will be when the US Marshalls perp walk Comey.
Mrs. Davis
The fun part is going to be the RICO law suits against the corporate media companies that coordinated with the Obama-Clinton thug-o-cracy between the 2018 and 2020 elections.
On-going litigation and depositions of all the major corporate big wigs and Clinton machine affiliated media stars — I’m looking at you George Stephanopolis — will make the 2020 (+) political campaigns very interesting.
Wow:
“Page wrote to Strzok on Sept. 2, 2016, about prepping Comey because “potus wants to know everything we’re doing.””
Now that is a big f’in deal.
Brian, yup, “What did the President know and when did he know it?” territory
Brian
Kerry…was and is garbage, from his time trashing Vietnam vets to his cheerleading the Sandinistas to helping force through the execrable Iran deal.
John Kerry’s cheerleading for the Sandinistas was what prompted me to vote the first time for a Republican. Within three months of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistsan, the Sandinistas signed a joint proclamation with the USSR denouncing the “reactionaries” who objected to the “progressive transformations” resulting from the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Hard to blame Reagan for pushing the Sandinistas into the laps of the Russians when the proclamation was signed 7 months before Reagan was elected.
In addition, several years later the Sandinistas arrested and jailed a Pole at the border who entered Nicaragua with a valid tourist visa. The crime? He was suspected of belonging to Solidarity. He was released after five months in jail. He wrote a book about his experience: De Polonia a Nicaragua.
It is all Battlespace preparation for the massive firings and prosecutions the Left’s internal security thug-o-cracy to come,
I hope that is the case. One sign might be the “failure” of Trump to nominate all those appointees to political posts. Maybe he is just going to eliminate them.
Pruit may be running a test operation to see how that goes.
Trent, I so wish that there was some way to definitively punish the media wh*res who have gone along with this, over and over – the wh*ores who carry tattle tales and water for the Dems, and the Clinton Corruption Corporation – but other than not watching them, and complaining to sponsors, I don’t see much else that we can do, under the bounds of law.
Of course, as they go madder and madder, like Captain Queeg fidget-spinning with his marbles and going on about strawberries and logic … we can only hope that enough moderates and non-insane can see how they have been played. Not holding my breath on that – but there is hope.
The claim now that that smoking gun text meant Obama just wanted to know the situation with the investigation into Russian election meddling so he could chew out Vlad is hilariously stupid. If he wanted that info, he’d go to NSA, not FBI.
Sgt Mom,
I dropped this in my own post, but it bears repeating here —
—-
Well, we just found our FISA spying scandal – RICO liability transmission vector from the FBI – DoJ spying on Trump to major media stars and organizations.
The Democratic National Committee.
Michael Isikoff was a contract worker for the DNC at the same time he worked for Yahoo News.
Michael Isikoff used Christopher Steele as a source for his reporting at Yahoo! News.
And Michael Isikoff’s Yahoo! News story was used in the FISA application to the FISC to spy on Carter Page.
See:
http://dailycaller.com/2018/02/05/carter-page-steele-isikoff-yahoo/
The DNC was by contract at the time an appendage of the Hillary For President Campaign.
See:
Inside Hillary Clinton’s Secret Takeover of the DNC
DONNA BRAZILE
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/11/02/clinton-brazile-hacks-2016-215774
Isikoff is the senior DC editor for Yahoo! News and that makes him Yahoo! News management.
—-
The real question now is how many media figures with management authority in corporate media organs had similar arrangements with the DNC.
Sgt Mom,
See Sundance’s latest at this link —
https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2018/02/07/batter-up-chairman-goodlatte-requests-fisa-court-documents-from-presiding-judge-rosemary-collyer/#more-145616
And the WSJ decides to go with: “Text From 2016 Shows Obama’s Interest in FBI Employees’ Work”
Haha. Also, it is clear that Never Trumpers are going to go down with that ship. The refusal to accept reality is breathtaking to behold.
I’ve been going through the Wayback machine now digging up more posts of Lex to repost. Undoubtedly people think writing my epilogue was a bit premature, and I would have to agree. Still more little gems to find and repost.
Here he is comparing the newspapers Washington Post and New York Times
He’s giving an example of how the New York Times has descended from a once great newspaper.
The Washington Post of course is the pre-Bezos Post.
https://thelexicans.wordpress.com/2018/02/08/a-foolish-consistency/
Re: L. Page text about reporting to Obama. Andy McCarthy instructs regarding the FBI & difference between criminal and counterintelligence investigations:
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/456222/lisa-page-obama-fbi-text-shows-trump-obstruction-claims-absurdity
The latest revelation about Strzok texting from inside a SCIF…? Mind-boggling. You do that in the military, and you’re going to prison. The FBI apparently has different standards.
This whole thing is amazing to observe, and I won’t even begin to predict where it ends.
Kirk,
The Strzok SCIF incident — which also involved the FBI’s chief lawyer hired at the recommendation of AG Holder — has alienated and delegitimized the FBI from every non-FBI US Military and US national security agency in the Federal government.
I cannot begin to describe the contempt this incident with the #3 at the FBI Counter-Intelligence has generated with anyone who takes national security classification seriously.
He TEXTED INSIDE A SCIF WITH THE DOOR OPEN.
SCIF’s are faraday cages. Completely cut off from outside EM radiation.
It is a go to jail security violation to take non-secure electronics inside a SCIF.
It is a go to jail security violation to leave a SCIF door open while accessing files inside one.
It is a go to jail security violation TEXT INSIDE A SCIF WITH THE DOOR EFFING OPEN!!!?!
Stzok, the FBI lawyer and the Security officer for the SCIF all need to go to jail for the rest of their lives and an example that no one is above the law.
And in the same prison right beside former Sec. of State Hillary Clinton.
“SCIF’s are faraday cages. Completely cut off from outside EM radiation.”
No, they are not. They’re “just” rooms or larger areas with special status, and special requirements on how they are constructed to make them very difficult to be monitored from the outside. You can certainly broadcast from within one. If you couldn’t the security rules and regs wouldn’t have to be so strict.
I’ve had SSO gleefully tell me that if we brought in a phone or other device, even for a moment, they could and would confiscate it and destroy it, since that was the protocol.
“I’m texting from inside Andy’s SCIF” is just the cherry on top of the open contempt the Dem machine shows for national security.
“Andy McCarthy instructs regarding the FBI & difference between criminal and counterintelligence investigations:”
I believe that the upper echelon of the FBI and DOJ wanted to believe the dossier was valid intelligence. However they never verified it before they weaponized it through FISA. While McCarthy’s point about the difference criminal and counter-intelligence investigations and the legality of “interference” seems correct, the issue is whether or not anti-Trump high ranking law enforcement and intelligence officials used an unsubstantiated, politically sourced document for political purposes AND was this directed or known by Barry.
Given the previous actions of many of these same officials (including Barry) in the criminal investigation of Clinton’s classified email security violations, I find it most difficult to credit them with apolitical motives in their evaluation and use of the dossier, lack of accounting of its origin and subsequent course of the “investigation.” Given that history and the author’s admitted motives, the statement about Barry wanting to know “everything we are doing” takes on an obvious strong political implication.
Just because the president has every right to know completely and to direct intelligence investigations, he has no authority to initiate and sustain such an investigation for blatantly political reasons. This is political racketeering. The fact the FISA warrant was repeatedly renewed when it was known by these officials to have been based on this primarily politically sourced document provided by a politically ardent partisan foreign national tells me they were politically motivated from the start. I do not know the law on such intelligence processes, but the politicalization of them should carry criminal penalties.
Death6
“I believe that the upper echelon of the FBI and DOJ wanted to believe the dossier was valid intelligence.”
I don’t. They 100% knew it was garbage. We know this because we know, though the MSM hasn’t reported it yet, that Fusion GPS was inside the DOJ doing 702 unmasking until Mike Rogers cut them off. The scope of what happened is mind boggling, and people aren’t at all prepared for what’s going to come out soon.
I agree with Brian — the upper echelon had to know it was all bogus, but any port will do in a storm, and all’s fair in love, war, and Trump-hate.
They had to know – otherwise, these people are so dumb they have no reason to be out without a keeper. This was willful and open-eyed perversion of the system in order to hobble a political candidate. And the establishment media wh*res were totally down with it.
Death 6,
I disagree with this thought —
>>I believe that the upper echelon of the FBI and DOJ wanted to believe the dossier was valid intelligence. However they never verified it before they weaponized it through FISA.
The behavior template you need to use is that special “Entitled-Arrogant rules don’t apply to me” and “Cause and effect does not exist” attitude that the “highly credentialed but uneducated” seem to specialize in now-a-days.
The collapse of American primary and secondary education was a generation old when I graduated high school in the early 1980’s. Yet I can still tell when the Power Point is fantasy in front of me because I still understand cause and effect.
Our “highly credentialed but uneducated elites” seem to think they can repeal cause and effect via bureaucratic fiat or influence with the right people.
The key behavior tell about them is they are very lazy sham-ers in the main. If there is a predetermined outcome, they do the absolute minimum necessary and sometimes even less.
For example, finding text strings required by classified format documents is automated. The word “Classified” and the text strings “(U)”, “(S)”, “FOUO”, “NOFOR” can be found in the text search functions in and commercial word processor or document program you can name.
That the Hillary e-mail investigation did not find classified marking in her e-mails — until DoJ Inspector General Horowitz came calling — is BECAUSE THEY DIDN’T LOOK.
Claims of incompetence afterwards are a a cover for the evil intent they are trying and failing to hide.
You have convinced me they most likely had to know, but I still believe they avoided any proper substantiation because they didn’t want to have to know. Either way it was malfeasance based on a political motivation. If they are as dumb as they would be if they really had no suspicion it was bogus, the structure is out of control. Hmm.
Death6
Death 6,
With this —
>>Either way it was malfeasance based on a political motivation.
You have just seen President Trump executing a “Xanatos Gambit” against the FBI and the Deep State.
Go read the explanation of “Xanatos Gambit” here:
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/XanatosGambit/RealLife
And carefully note that President Trump was a Casino Billionaire before he became US President.
Death6: Do you ever read the conservative treehouse? If you do you’ll be several months ahead of the MSM, and know that they haven’t yet reported on 90% of the scandal that’s already been made public.
Some. I’ll do more.
Death6
“I agree with Brian — the upper echelon had to know it was all bogus, but any port will do in a storm, and all’s fair in love, war, and Trump-hate.”
Keep in mind that ADAG Bruce Ohr’s wife, Nellie, worked for Fusion GPS, at essentially the same time that Steele did – as their Russian expert. And there is some evidence that she put Simpson at Fusion together with Steele in the first place. The Ohrs appear to have known Glenn Simpson and his wife, Mary Jacoby, who own Fusion, for some time, so it should be no surprise that ADAG Ohr was the DoJ liaison with Fusion. This means that the wife of an Associate Deputy Attorney General, a direct report to DAG Andy McCade, was intimately involved in the creation of the Steele Dossier. So, yes, they knew.