Politics

The Attempted Coup is Collapsing.

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Victor Davis Hanson thinks the attempted coup d’etat is dead.

The illegal effort to destroy the 2016 Trump campaign by Hillary Clinton campaign’s use of funds to create, disseminate among court media, and then salt among high Obama administration officials, a fabricated, opposition smear dossier failed.

So has the second special prosecutor phase of the coup to abort the Trump presidency failed.

The conspiracy is certainly collapsing. Where did Andrew McCabe come from ?

He was a lawyer but not a sworn agent of the FBI until 1996..

McCabe began his FBI career in the New York Field Office[18] in 1996.[20] While there, he was on the SWAT team.[21] In 2003, he began work as a supervisory special agent at the Eurasian Organized Crime Task Force.[22] Later, McCabe held management positions in the FBI Counterterrorism Division,[18] the FBI National Security Branch[23] and the FBI’s Washington Field Office.

I see no evidence of any administrative roll, such as SAC or ASAC.

McCabe did not oversee the Clinton email server probe while his wife was running for office and he was excluded from FBI investigations into public corruption cases in Virginia.

Was he involved in the Clinton Foundation scandals BEFORE his wife ran for office with the assistance of Terry McAuliffe and his $700,000 ? I learned that Virginia has no rules about the use of campaign funds for personal use. She lost and and the remainder of the donation was hers.

Conservative Tree House has some more on McCabe.

Mark Penn, former Clinton campaign aide, agrees that it was an attempted coup.

The most egregious anti-democratic actions ever taken by the what can now fairly be called the Deep State are confirmed with the publication of fired FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe’s new book detailing how the FBI and Justice Department plotted to remove President Trump from office for firing FBI Director James Comey.

Justice Department and FBI officials spied on U.S. citizens with false warrants, gave a pass to one presidential campaign with a predetermined investigation, investigated another political campaign on the basis of no verified evidence, and illegally leaked information on investigations. They discussed wiretapping and using the 25th Amendment to the Constitution to remove President Trump, and appointed a special counsel as a retaliatory move for Comey’s firing.

This is a bigger scandal than the successful Nixon coup d’etat.

The differences are two. One, Trump has no skeleton like Nixon’s aid for the burglars which opened him to accusations of coverup. Two, unlike Nixon, Trump does not care what his enemies think.

The very bad Continuing Resolution and how we got here.

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We now have a a terrible non-compromise Continuing Resolution on border security. The Appropriations committee reported out HR31, the Continuing Resolution.

The Homeland Security division of this bill upholds Democratic values and funds smart and effective border security including construction and screening technology at ports of entry, where most drugs illegally enter the country.

The $1.375 billion it provides for border barriers is 76% less than the President demanded for a concrete wall, and critical protections are put in place for environmentally sensitive areas.

Neither Democrats nor Republicans got everything they wanted, yet every Democrat and nearly every Republican who served on the conference committee to write this bill has signed it in support.

Boilerplate. The real story is what was inserted in conference.

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The Covington story and hatred of Catholics.

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The past week has been occupied with the story of the boys from Covington Catholic high school in Kentucky. These boys came to DC in a bus to attend the 2019 March for Life, an event in which hundreds to thousands demonstrate against abortion in the streets of Washington DC. This event is usually ignored by the American press. This year, two small activist groups also planned to demonstrate. One was called The Black Hebrew Israelites, A small fringe group.

groups of Black Americans who believe that they are descendants of the ancient Israelites. Black Hebrews adhere in varying degrees to the religious beliefs and practices of both Christianity and Judaism. With the exception of a small number of individuals who have formally converted to Judaism, they are not recognized as Jews by the greater Jewish community. Many choose to identify themselves as Hebrew Israelites or Black Hebrews rather than Jews in order to indicate their claimed historic connections.

The group that collected near the Lincoln Memorial, was a particularly obnoxious group that shouted slurs at the teenagers waiting for the bus to take them home.

“They called us ‘racists,’ ‘bigots,’ ‘white crackers,’ ‘faggots’ and ‘incest kids.’ They also taunted an African-American student from my school by telling him that we would ‘harvest his organs.’ I have no idea what that insult means, but it was startling to hear,” Sandmann wrote.
The remark about harvesting organs may reference Jordan Peele’s horror-satire “Get Out,” a 2017 movie in which the black boyfriend of a white girl discovers her family is harvesting the organs of blacks.

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How is the Shutdown Going ?

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We are now in week three of the partial government “shutdown” over the refusal of Democrats to fund any of Trump’s wall. They see this as another “Read My Lips” situation which, if they can make Trump back down, it will kill his re-election campaign just as it did to Bush in 1992.

But Trump’s base takes the wall itself seriously, and, like George H.W. Bush’s 1988 campaign pledge on taxes, the wall has become the president’s “read my lips” albatross. His supporters may not abandon him over it, but Trump’s re-election hinges entirely on their enthusiasm. Yes, they will vote for him, but will they engage in the get-out-the-vote activities that drive to the polls enough additional voters to put Trump over the top?

How is that going ? Even Texas Monthly, no friend of Republicans agrees.

Jet skis dropping off pregnant women. Chinese border crossers in fancy workout attire. A park full of could-be spies. These sights of the Rio Grande are almost hallucinatory, but they don’t seem to alarm Spratte. They seem to fatigue him. Not long ago, he says, agents’ mouths would drop open when they’d hear about a group of fifty immigrants getting caught. Now, he says, “if you tell me, I’ve got a group of fifty, I need help, I would laugh at you. If you said, I’ve got a group of three hundred, now that would be cool, because that would be a new record. And the records are only going to keep increasing.” (According to Spratte, agents in the Valley have had a single pickup of around 280 immigrants.)

Trump visited the wall yesterday and CNN’s Jim Acosta gave Trump a hand at making his case.

I know this might be hard for you to comprehend Jimbo, but the reason why all of Twitter has been mocking you today is because you were at a part of the border WITH A WALL. So yes, of course it was working. Replicate that across the border & we’ll all be safer. #RealNews #ByeBye

It did not look too good for Acosta to brag about how safe it was near a wall. OR fence, if you prefer.

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Trump is winning on immigration.

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We currently have a “partial government shutdown” which no one seems to notice. Most of the appropriations bills were passed and signed. The Homeland Security budget became a Continuing Resolution and is being held hostage in the Senate where Chuck Schumer has vowed “So, President Trump, you will not get your wall,”

Trump has not vetoed anything so the responsibility for the “shutdown” is not obvious. The 40,000 federal employees who are furloughed or not getting paid are over 80% Democrats. The most recent pay period will result in checks today. Then the next pay period in two weeks will be the one where the “nonessentials” will not be paid.

Schumer: “So, President Trump, you will not get your wall,” Schumer added. “Abandon your shutdown strategy. You’re not getting the wall today, next week, or on January 3 when Democrats take control of the House.”

How is this playing in the country ? Some surprises.

Ann Althouse reads the Washington Post so I don’t have to.

She notices the comments to that article on the child that died in US custody.

I’ve excerpted the parts of the article that might make a reader want to blame the father. Was the boy exploited? Was he regarded as expendable? There’s plenty else in the article that might make you want to blame the U.S. government (mainly for not giving quicker medical treatments). I would also think many readers would mostly feel sad that a boy died and bemoan poverty generally. So I was surprised at how harsh the comments were against the father. I didn’t expect this at The Washington Post. This is the most liked comment:
This child’s siblings in Guatemala are alive and well. The child was dragged to the US using money that could have paid the father’s overdue electric bill, which is not a reason to grant asylum.

I wonder how long the Democrats will let this go on if Trump does not cave in ? He seems to have a gut instinct about what Americans think.

CNN seems to think that signing MAGA hats in Iraq is some sort of crime.

CNN Pentagon reporter Barbara Starr said “a lot of questions” have been raised following President Trump’s surprise visit to troops in Iraq where he signed ‘Make America Great Again’ hats and flags.

“There’s a lot of concern because military policy, military regulation prohibits military members in uniform from doing anything that can be construed as a political endorsement. That’s what you want from your U.S. military. They’re not a political force,” Starr reported.

“How did the red hats get there? Some people are saying, well, the troops just brought them and wanted to get them signed. But even if that is the case, the question remains, there were commanders, there were senior enlisted personnel on the scene, they know the regulation. Why did this happen?” Starr asked.

The cluelessness is almost painful. Obama signed stuff when he was president.

What will the end game look like? The new House is even farther left wing than the Senate. Could the “shutdown” go on for months ?

Look at the comments to the WaPoo article.

Thank you. I am liberal myself but I get tired of people who shut off their critical thinking when it comes to brown people. This guy made a spectacularly risky decision, and his child paid the price. It’s on his head. This is, of course, on the assumption that the U.S. wasn’t negligent in the kid’s care – which is certainly possible. Nonetheless it’s his father who endangered him.

This looks like trouble for Democrats. What if Trump stares down Democrats for months ?