Performance Art with No Performers

 

Mark Stey skewers the posers in Washinton as no one can.  Some excerpts:

Until January 6th, the highlight of Michael Byrd's "law-enforcement" career was leaving his loaded Glock in a congressional men's room and paying no price. He "serves" with the grotesquely misnamed "Capitol Police", which is not a police department but a praetorian guard - a personal security team for the praetors of Congress. Lieutenant Byrd shot and killed Ashli Babbitt, a 5'2" unarmed woman, because "she was posing a threat to the US House of Representatives".

All that has been known for months by anyone who wanted to know. The only real news in NBC's Byrd exclusive was the level of his self-congratulation:

I believe I showed the utmost courage on January 6.

.....

 America is a land that tends to the utmost in all things. At the end of the nineteenth century, Bernard Shaw popularized the term "chocolate soldier" - the dashing hussar who is useless in battle but looks good in a uniform. We have the tutti-frutti generals: Thoroughly Modern Milley and his chums, whose diversity ribbons from shoulder to scrotum advertise their own utmostness even as they explain why everything going wrong merely demonstrates how everything is going right.

The tutti-frutti generals report to the ice-cream commander-in-chief melting all over the lectern every afternoon. 

.....

Until the "fortified" US election of 2020, it was one of the most reliable political axioms that something beats nothing. But, doing Soviet decay on an American budget, whoever's running the Democrats spent two years and a bazillion dollars installing their particular nothing. At the end of Biden's presser, when he slumped over the microphone during Peter Doocy's question, I almost felt for poor ol' Joe: Is there no DC shyster willing to take him on as a wizened Britney and sue Dr Jill for being an abusive conservatrix? 

......

Incidentally, had you heard any of these networks mention "Isis-K" until this week? Now it's the Delta Variant of jihad, and every correspondent is an instant expert on the implacable hostility between the K variant and the Talibs.

.....

Christmas has come early for Washington's enemies. Literally. Kackling Kamala Harris was dispatched to Singapore to assure our allies that the hyperpower was not a complete laughingstock. Instead, she told her hosts that it's beginning to look a lot like Christmas is as kaput as the Karzai International gift shop:

'If you want to have Christmas toys for your children, it might now be might be the time to start buying them, because the delay may be many, many months,' she said.

Oh, my. Why would that be?

She blamed global warming; I'm not kidding!

someone needs to say it to Kamala and Joe and Nancy and Thoroughly Modern Milley, Tailspin Taylor, Darth Plexi-Visor and all the rest. America has ceded global dominance to dark forces that nevertheless have an existential advantage: they are real, and animated by reality; we are utterly, contemptibly fake, warning of rising sea levels at Santa's Grotto as halfwit goatherds blow us to kingdom come.

The appropriate reaction to John Brennan

When you get away from the swamp and it's slimy deals the denizens make to cover up for each other, you find the truth.

This is the guy who survived the Benghzi attack and helped write write the book "13 Hours," later turned into a feature film, about the Benghazi attack. He has said he and his team lost their security clearances for speaking out.

My principles are greater than clearances too John, especially when you and the @CIA kool-aid drinkers punished us for not going along with the Benghazi cover-up story in order to protect you, @HillaryClinton ‘s & @BarackObama ‘s failures. You put your politics before us. https://t.co/qWFWujKthL

— Kris Paronto (@KrisParonto) August 16, 2018

. ⁦@JohnBrennan⁩ you put your leftist politics before Patriots then and now.... that stripper named Karma is getting closer 😡 . #leftisthack https://t.co/3MOTf5qes0

— Kris Paronto (@KrisParonto) August 17, 2018

But the left wing elitist feels it necessary to lecture conservatives , including the President , about honor & integrity. @JohnBrennan #NoHonor #NoIntegrity #Leftisthack https://t.co/3Vdl3EHPwt

— Kris Paronto (@KrisParonto) August 17, 2018

..Or caught lying to congress OR caught spying on Pres. candidates OR caught using their positions to influence US elections OR caught fabricating stories about attacks on US personnel in Libya OR providing weapons to ISIS backed militias in Syria ..should I go on @JohnBrennan ? https://t.co/Vk6ui6SmR7

— Kris Paronto (@KrisParonto) August 17, 2018

My principles are greater than clearances too John, especially when you and the @CIA kool-aid drinkers punished us for not going along with the Benghazi cover-up story in order to protect you, @HillaryClinton ‘s & @BarackObama ‘s failures. You put your politics before us. https://t.co/qWFWujKthL

— Kris Paronto (@KrisParonto) August 16, 2018

Contreras Recusal Conflict – FBI Agent Peter Strzok Friends With Flynn Judge Rudolph Contreras…

For those following the increasingly curious case against General Mike Flynn, events take another unusual turn today. Congressional investigators have shared a set of unredacted text messages between FBI Agent Peter Strzok and his cohort DOJ Attorney Lisa Page which reveal a personal friendship between Agent Strzok and Flynn’s initial presiding judge Rudolph Contreras.

Read the whole thing.

Hopefully it's only temporary, until the swamp gets drained.

THE MUELLER TEST AND THE PAPER CIVIL WAR ON TRUMP

Daniel Greenfield on A last ditch effort by the establishment to wrest control from the president.

The original civil war was fought by farmhands and factory workers, freed slaves and young boys turned soldiers; the new civil war is being fought by lawyers in blue or gray suits not with bullets, but with bullet points.

From the Mueller investigation to Federal judges declaring that President Trump doesn’t have the right to control immigration policy or command the military, from political sabotage at the DOJ by Obama appointees like Sally Yates to Patagonia’s lawsuit over national monuments, the cold civil war set off by the left’s rejection of the 2016 election results has been a paper war largely waged by lawyers.

“The biggest threat to New Yorkers right now is the federal government,” Attorney General Eric Schneiderman of New York recently declared. The radical leftist pol who had once vowed to do everything possible to elect Hillary Clinton was explaining his hundred lawsuits against the government on everything from net neutrality to the travel ban meant to keep out the Islamic terrorists running over tourists near Ground Zero and bombing commuters in the tunnels off Times Square.

Islamic terrorists have killed thousands of people in New York City in the last two decades. Net neutrality’s current death toll hovers around zero. The Federal government is far less of a threat to New Yorkers than their own government which insists that Islamic terrorists should be able to kill them. But it is a great threat to a class of political lawyers whose ranks include AG Schneiderman, Hawaii’s Judge Derrick Watson, Mueller’s team, Sally Yates, the ACLU and countless other #resistance combatants.

And ...

Will the American people govern themselves? Or will Mueller, Schneiderman, Watson, Yates and ten thousand other elites with law degrees be allowed to turn elections into a meaningless farce?

Federal judges have seized previously unimaginable amounts of power by not only blocking orders that had always been considered an essential part of presidential authority on flimsy premises that when dissected amount to a critique of President Trump’s character (not to mention the sovereign entitlement of the University of Hawaii to set national immigration policy for the entire country based on its urgent need for Syrian grad students), but by demanding that agencies under the control of the President of the United States enact their orders, such as accepting transgender military recruits.

The absurd outcomes of these rulings, that the University of Hawaii can set national immigration policy, but not the President of the United States, and that fitness to serve in the military can be determined by a Federal judge, but not by the military or the commander in chief, are only an irrational side effect of a conflict between the elected branches of government and an unelected class of political lawyers.

The Mueller investigation has to be seen in the context of a battle between the democratic powers of the people to choose their own representatives and the lawyers who actually run the government. Elections are being replaced by investigations and litigation as the engines of government. You don’t need to win an election to investigate elected officials. You don’t need public support to sue either.

Read the whole thing.

Top FBI official linked to reporter who broke Trump dossier story

Politico:

James Baker, the FBI's recently reassigned general counsel, was in touch with David Corn of Mother Jones in the fall of 2016, GOP sources said.

Former FBI Director  James Comey thinks this was all part of a FBI's job.

James Comey

✔@Comey

Sadly, we are now at a point in our political life when anyone can be attacked for partisan gain. James Baker, who is stepping down as FBI General Counsel, served our country incredibly well for 25 years & deserves better. He is what we should all want our public servants to be.

11:27 PM - Dec 22, 2017

•  5,8595,859 Replies
 
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From Politico:

The GOP sources said the documents — made available recently to lawmakers by the Department of Justice — revealed that James Baker, the FBI's general counsel, communicated with Mother Jones reporter David Corn in the weeks leading up to the November 2016 election. Corn was the first to report the existence of the dossier on Oct. 31 and that it was compiled by a former high-level western spy.

We now get a better view of "The Swamp" when the curtain gets pulled back and Democrats are no longer fully in charge of covering up. 

This is the reason the swamp creatures are fighting so hard.

They don't call them the Ruling Class for nothing.

Via the Daily Mail

Attorney General and FBI chief spend $11MILLION flying in luxury jets bought for counter-terrorism missions between 2007 and 2011

Attorney General Eric Holder, his predecessors Michael Mukasey and Alberto Gonzales, and FBI director Robert Mueller went on nearly 700 'non-mission' trips over the period

The bulk of the flights were taken on the FBI's two Gulfstream V jets and cost on average $16,285

Luxury jets were bought to be used for conducting a variety of counter-terrorism, intelligence, and criminal surveillance activities

A quarter of the pricey 'non-mission' travel was personal, though the officials paid back a fraction of the cost on these occasions

This is the sort of thing that comes with reaching the top of the swamp. You get to ride around in limos and jets at the taxpayer's expense, without having to do any real work. 

Al Franken is just the beginning

Want to know one very, very big reason why Washington DC needs to be removed from our lives?  Because it attracts the most horrible people.

Consider Joe Biden. A few short weeks ago, the former senator and vice president seemed like he would be a leading contender to win the Democratic nomination for president in 2020 and then the favorite to challenge President Trump's bid for re-election. But now? Biden's polling may look good, but he has a history of wandering hands that is simply incompatible with the new normal. He's a political dead man.

Now think of all the pages and interns and young staffers cycling through all of those offices on Capitol Hill, year after year, decade after decade. And the countless thousands of staffers who've passed through the White House and executive branch departments and agencies across Democratic and Republican administrations. And all the Supreme Court clerks and assistants. How long until one of these pages or interns or staffers or clerks or assistants, or dozens of them, or hundreds of them, begin to talk and make credible accusations against leading public figures of both parties?

How many unwanted advances, kisses, gropes, coerced sex acts, and other forms of harassment, abuse, and assault are we likely to learn about?

I suspect far more than any of us can imagine.

Already we know that the House has paid out $15 million over the last 10-15 years to settle sexual harassment allegations. And that is surely just the beginning.

The reckoning is coming. Washington is going to weather an absolute hurricane of sexual abuse allegations and revelations.

CNN’s Undisclosed Ties To Fusion GPS

It's all one big incestuous swamp.

Panetta: Intelligence Committee Needs to Look into Clinton/DNC Dossier Payment

Trying to retain some shred of dignity when you're part of the Swamp.

In Washington The Narrative is Everything

Via Instapundit:

OF NARRATIVES PAST AND PRESENT: In the new issue of Commentary, Andrew Ferguson profiles veteran DC journalist Elizabeth Drew, whom he describes as “Washington’s Keeper of the Narratives.”

Read the whole thing.

Comeytose State

Mark Steyn on Comey:

Steyn said he doesn't even want to think about Comey ("Shoot me now")

On Comey the psychologically weird:

On October 19th last year I called Comey "a 6' 8" gummi worm". That was very much on display on Thursday, as the straight arrow writhed and agonized over what he might have done had he been a "stronger man". He is far too psychologically weird and insecure ever to have got close to being FBI Director (far weirder than Hoover, even if you believe every single story about the guy), and the fact that he did ought to be deeply unnerving to Americans.

On the Russia investigation:

As everyone more sentient than an earthworm should know by now, "the Russia investigation" is Deep State dinner-theatre. I wrote a while back that, in today's Hollywood, what Hitchcock used to call "the MacGuffin" - the pretext that sets the caper afoot, the secret papers, the microfilm - has degenerated into a MacNuffin: there's no longer even a pretense that these stories are about anything. The "Russia investigation" is the ne plus ultra of MacNuffins, so smoothly transferred from Los Angeles to Washington that one vaguely suspects some studio vice-prez who bundled for Hillary came up with the idea as a reality-show pilot that accidentally bust out of the laboratory.

On Trump being in cahoots with the Russians:

He isn't, and never has been. Comey confirmed that to Trump three times. As far as I'm aware, I'm not a suspected Russian agent, but I know something about being mired under a cloud of suspicion. In the Mann vs Steyn case, I have made the point in court filings to the various lethargic jurists that being an alleged defamer is a serious slur on one's reputation that should entitle one to a speedy trial. To no avail, of course: we're about to enter our sixth year in the clogged toilet of DC justice, and no nearer a trial date in that joke jurisdiction than we were on Day One. Likewise, were my local paper to report "unnamed sources" claiming that the sheriff's department was investigating me as a suspected drug dealer, I would expect the sheriff to issue a statement saying that there was no such investigation. How much worse is it for the incoming chief of state of the global superpower when false rumors are circulating that he's a Russian agent? And these rumors are being disseminated with the express intent of crippling his incoming administration before it's even come in?

Comey's rationale for refusing to announce in public that Trump isn't "under investigation" was that that situation might conceivably change in the future. That's like the sheriff refusing to confirm that I'm not under investigation because he doesn't know whether I'll hold up a liquor store next week. Given the damage done by the leaking of every vague guilt-by-association rumor but not the central fact of the case, Trump was right to fire this guy - in the national interest.

On impeachment:

What happens if Trump is impeached and removed from office? Easy: Having tasted blood, "the Russia investigation" will move on to Mike Pence, and Comey's successor will announce he can't confirm or deny whether Pence is under investigation. So Pence will be impeached and removed, and Speaker Ryan will become the next person whose status as crack Russian undercover operative can't be confirmed or denied, and so it will go all the way down through the President Pro Tem of the Senate and the Secretary of Transportation and the Director of the Bureau of Paper Clips. Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia, and Trumpiana has always been in league with Russia.

This is why Washington must be overturned and why Trump's election was A VERY GOOD THING. 

Swamp Rat James Comey

I have been told that you can't believe anything most things stuff you read on the internet.  but we also know that most of what we read in the so-called "legitimate" press is also a pack of lies.

For example, just yesterday, Liberal Saint (and former FBI Director) James Comey testified that a major story in the NY Times was a lie from end to end.

So I read the following narrative with a jaundiced eye and decided to do a little checking on my own, just to see if the basic facts, dates, times, and job descriptions was accurate.  I was really surprised to find out that it is.  The opinions are those of the author, Kevin Jackson.

So here goes:

James Comey is a poisonous snake of the highest order.

He is a deep-water Swamp Denizen who has been highly paid to deliberately provide cover for high-level corruption by the Clintons and Obama. He has been central to trying to destroy the Trump campaign and then the Trump administration from the start. He is as dirty as they come in DC.

Comey had highest-level cover (the FBI no less) and was deep into an effort to eliminate Trump. Trump had to move hard, fast, and at exactly the right time to cut the head off the snake without getting bitten by the snake or being finished by the other swamp denizens.

Trump’s Quiet Victories

Conrad Black on Trump's ability to drive his enemies mad.

Donald Trump has not just been a distasteful opponent, as the D.C. political establishment generally considered Nixon; or a convivial Californian outsider like Reagan, who changed economic and strategic course but didn’t attack pillars of Washington incumbency. Nixon and Reagan had contested numerous elections as Republicans, and despite the odd rhetorical flourish, weren’t going to do more than make course corrections from their Democratic predecessors, Lyndon Johnson and Jimmy Carter.

But Trump was different. He launched a movement, paid for his own campaign, (no ghastly fund-raisers with the dumb, opinionated rich), dismissed the Bushes, McCain, and Romney as Clinton-Obama sound-alikes, and frontally assaulted Wall Street, Hollywood, the national media, the lobby system, and every adult in Washington D.C. (which voted 96 percent against him).

Trump’s crushing victory in the Republican primaries was attributed to the weakness of the other candidates―he would hit a stonewall with Hillary. His victory over Hillary was a freakish product of the vagaries of the electoral system (from which John Quincy Adams, Hayes, Benjamin Harrison, JFK, and George W. Bush also benefited), and of Russian interference via Wikileaks and otherwise, and the conduct of FBI director James Comey. (Comey was at first praised for his “integrity” for recommending against indictment of Mrs. Clinton after recounting a sequence of her likely illegalities.) As was foreseen, the response of the solid anti-Trump press after the election was not that public grievances against Washington must be based on something, but rather that there were more racist, sexist, gun-happy, Bible-thumping, lager-lout philistines than had been appreciated....

The bizarrerie of the intellectual right is illimitable. My dear and esteemed friend George Will, after an acrobatic exercise in the columnar snobbery that Trump was unaware that Andrew Jackson died 16 years before the start of the Civil War, (Jackson was concerned about the danger of civil war throughout his presidency, as George knows and Mr. Trump was alleging), has fled into the television embrace of Rachel the Madd and Mika Buzzfeed at MSNBC, the most astonishing flight since Joachim von Ribbentrop went to Moscow. They have all walked the plank; President Trump has induced self-destructive political bilharzia in the deranged effigies of once-serious and important people. I still love them, but I grieve for them....

The self-targeted Democratic torpedoes, which Trump had the tactical intelligence to goad and then to consign to due process, were the lies about collusion between the Kremlin and the Trump campaign, and the challenge to the president’s constitutional authority over immigration, (reinforced by ninjas smashing and burning at Berkeley, and the mobbing of travelers at airports around the country and overseas). The torpedoes will come home on those who launched them in the next few months, warhead-first and at high speed. Then, frenzied partisanship will start to give way to the instinct of self-preservation, and the locked-arm solidarity of the Never-Trumpers will start to break up. The party of Jefferson and FDR is unrecognizable, but it can still be distinguished from a liberal ISIS. The president’s shortcomings are overly notorious, but his enemies are no longer of this world. He will win, and change the nation for the better.

Read the whole thing.

For Comey, a creature of the swamp, a deserved dunking

By Charles Hurt:

This is what happens if you mess with the swamp. All the swamp creatures begin snapping and writhing and yowling like angry cats in the dark.

For the better part of a year now, the only thing everyone in Washington could agree upon was that now-ex FBI Director Jim Comey was an overreaching, underperforming dolt.

He fancied himself to be attorney general after he had lost all confidence in Loretta Lynch, the actual attorney general.

That was after Ms. Lynch had met privately on a jet with former President Bill Clinton on a tarmac in Phoenix. This was at a time when Mr. Clinton’s wife was running for president while under investigation by the attorney general and the FBI for criminal misuse of classified emails.

Wearing his Big Boy AG shoes last summer, Mr. Comey delivered the most damning nonindictment of Mrs. Clinton in the history of criminal justice.

After listing a long rap sheet of inexcusable, reckless and conspiratorial handling of state secrets over a purposely concealed home email server — designed specifically to shield Mrs. Clinton from public scrutiny — Mr. Comey jarringly announced that he was recommending that no charges would be forthcoming.

“Although there is evidence of potential violations of the statutes regarding the handling of classified information, our judgment is that no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case,” he said, concluding his withering damnation of Mrs. Clinton last July.

But, lest any mere mortals think they might get away with doing the same thing Mrs. Clinton had done, Mr. Comey was blunt.

“To be clear, this is not to suggest that in similar circumstances, a person who engaged in this activity would face no consequences,” he warned. “To the contrary, those individuals are often subject to security or administrative sanctions.”

“But” he added, “that is not what we are deciding now.”

In other words, if you are a former first lady who is about to be the next president and whose husband is a former president who just met privately on a plane on a tarmac, then you won’t be charged. But if you are a mere citizen or public employee with no such influence, you’re gambling with your life and your career.

Ahhh, life in the swamp.

Read the whole thing.

Podesta Friend At DOJ Led Cover-Up Of IRS Scandal

Part of the swamp that needs draining:

Senior Department of Justice official Peter J. Kadzik, newly exposed by WikiLeaks as colluding with Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, is the same Obama appointee who helped cover up the Internal Revenue Service’s deliberate targeting of conservative and Tea Party groups. ...

[Lois] Lerner refused to testify at congressional hearings, instead invoking her Fifth Amendment rights to avoid possible self-incrimination. Congressional investigators found that the IRS targeted right-of-center 501(c)(4) nonprofit advocacy groups during the 2010 and 2012 election cycles. They determined that Lerner organized an unprecedented crackdown on Tea Party and conservative groups and then attempted to scapegoat those nonprofits, blaming them for the harsh treatment they received at her instigation. ...

At DOJ, Kadzik also put the kibosh a year ago on any possible criminal prosecution of Lois Lerner. ... Kadzik was dismissive. "Ineffective management is not a crime," he wrote. "The Department of Justice's exhaustive probe revealed no evidence that would support a criminal prosecution. What occurred is disquieting and may necessitate corrective action — but it does not warrant criminal prosecution."

Kadzik wrote there was no proof of bad intent on Lerner's part and that she seemed to try to correct the inappropriately tough scrutiny on conservative and Tea Party nonprofits once she "recognized that it was wrong." "In fact, Ms. Lerner was the first IRS official to recognize the magnitude of the problem and to take concerted steps to fix it," he wrote. ...

Kadzik is tied to the Democratic Party Establishment and is a donor to Democrat candidates. Using his private Gmail account, on May 19, 2015, Kadzik tipped off John Podesta, Hillary's campaign chairman and former White House chief of staff in Bill Clinton's administration, about an upcoming hearing, according to a WikiLeaks document dump. ...

Earlier this year, WikiLeaks published a Sept. 8, 2008 email from Podesta, then serving on the Obama transition team, to Cassandra Butts of the Obama campaign. Podesta boasted in it that Kadzik — who represented him when he was accused of procuring a job for Bill Clinton paramour Monica Lewinsky as a way to keep her quiet — was a "fantastic lawyer" who "kept me out of jail."