The FISA application: Nunes was right (and it’s not Andrew C. McCarthy’s FBI anymore)

The FISA application: Nunes was right (and it’s not Andrew C. McCarthy’s FBI anymore)

The FISA application for surveillance on Carter Page finally was released to the public on Saturday, in a heavily redacted but lengthy version. Saturday is the time that news stories ordinarily go to die, but this one has gotten quite a bit of attention nevertheless.

The person who has been the most consistently fine reporter and commentator on everything to do with these investigations is Andrew C. McCarthy. As I’ve written many times before, he is also the most knowledgeable and experienced about procedure related to such matters.

Here’s a video of McCarthy’s initial comments in reaction:

This is a particularly important admission because confirmation bias would ordinarily cause him to think the opposite. It’s one of the reasons I so admire McCarthy; he can admit he’s wrong. He also isn’t usually wrong. But he has been consistently wrong in thinking that the same agencies (and even in some cases the same people) he used to know in another time and another setting (a non-Trump-Derangement setting) are being on the up-and-up and have some integrity in connection with their actions towards Trump and anything to do with Trump.

McCarthy can hardly believe the truth he’s learned; it’s so disillusioning. But he does believe it when he sees the evidence right before his eyes.

McCarthy has had a little more time now to write a column, and he further expands on some of the ideas he touched on in that interview. Please read his column in its entirety. Here’s an excerpt:

When people started theorizing that the FBI had presented the Steele dossier to the FISA court as evidence, I told them they were crazy: The FBI, which I can’t help thinking of as my FBI after 20 years of working closely with the bureau as a federal prosecutor, would never take an unverified screed and present it to a court as evidence. I explained that if the bureau believed the information in a document like the dossier, it would pick out the seven or eight most critical facts and scrub them as only the FBI can — interview the relevant witnesses, grab the documents, scrutinize the records, connect the dots. Whatever application eventually got filed in the FISA court would not even allude en passant to Christopher Steele or his dossier. The FBI would go to the FISA court only with independent evidence corroborated through standard FBI rigor.
…[and] in the unlikely event the FBI ever went off the reservation, the Justice Department would not permit the submission to the FISA court of uncorroborated allegations; and even if that fail-safe broke down, a court would not approve such a warrant.
It turns out, however, that the crazies were right and I was wrong. The FBI (and, I’m even more sad to say, my Justice Department) brought the FISA court the Steele dossier allegations, relying on Steele’s credibility without verifying his information.
I am embarrassed by this not just because I assured people it could not have happened, and not just because it is so beneath the bureau…I am embarrassed because what happened here flouts rudimentary investigative standards. Any trained FBI agent would know that even the best FBI agent in the country could not get a warrant based on his own stellar reputation…
…Much of my bewilderment, in fact, stems from the certainty that if I had been so daft as to try to get a warrant based on the good reputation of one of my FBI case agents, with no corroboration of his or her sources, just about any federal judge in the Southern District of New York would have knocked my block off — and rightly so.
That’s why I said it.

And what I have to say to Andrew McCarthy is this: it’s not your FBI or your DOJ anymore. You’ve been away for a while, and the entire ethos seems to have changed, and those changes are dangerous. The frenzy to get Trump has caused the people involved to cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil:

I keep putting that video up on this blog, because it keeps being relevant. The law is, among other things, a set of processes and procedures designed to protect us all. Cut a great road through it and it endangers us all. FISA courts are especially dangerous because they are secret, and the protections must be that much greater for that reason. The system has apparently completely broken down, and the change of heart of Andrew McCarthy—who previously had faith in it—on this topic is proof of how very bad the situation is.

McCarthy also has a great deal more to say in that essay about what is actually in the application and what it means. Other people have written on the same subject, and in particular on how the release of the application vindicates the Nunes memo (see this).

And yet, of course, you can find articles (this for example) on the left saying the released application proves Nunes wrong. They rehash the same old ideas such as this:

The most notorious claim of the Nunes memo was that the FBI failed to properly disclose that one of the sources cited in the original warrant application, former British spy Christopher Steele, was hired by Trump’s political opponents. According to the Nunes memo, the FBI didn’t “disclose or reference the role of the DNC, Clinton campaign, or any party/campaign in funding Steele’s efforts, even though the political origins of the Steele dossier were then known to senior and FBI officials.”
Democrats had later said that the FBI did acknowledge that the source’s employers were working against Trump, and sure enough, it seems Nunes left that detail out…

See that funny little shift there? That’s sophistry at its finest, and that’s the way this sort of thing is written. Nunes said the document didn’t mention the role of the DNC, the Clinton campaign, or any party/campaign. And guess what? That’s exactly what the release of the memo proves—they didn’t. Byron York deals with the same issue in much greater detail with much greater clarity and truth:

The fifth paragraph [of the Nunes memo]:
a) Neither the initial application in October 2016, nor any of the renewals, disclose or reference the role of the DNC, Clinton campaign, or any party/campaign in funding Steele’s efforts, even though the political origins of the Steele dossier were then known to senior DOJ and FBI officials.
[York writes] That is accurate. Readers will search the FISA application in vain for any specific mention of the DNC, Clinton campaign, or any party/campaign funding of the dossier. For the most part, names were not used in the application, but Donald Trump was referred to as “Candidate #1,” Hillary Clinton was referred to as “Candidate #2,” and the Republican Party was referred to as “Political Party #1.” Thus, the FISA application could easily have explained that the dossier research was paid for by “Candidate #2” and “Political Party #2,” meaning the Democrats. And yet the FBI chose to describe the situation this way, in a footnote: “Source #1…was approached by an identified U.S. person, who indicated to Source #1 that a U.S.-based law firm had hired the identified U.S. person to conduct research regarding Candidate #1’s ties to Russia…The identified U.S. person hired Source #1 to conduct this research. The identified U.S. person never advised Source #1 as to the motivation behind the research into Candidate #1’s ties to Russia. The FBI speculates that the identified U.S. person was likely looking for information that could be used to discredit Candidate #1’s campaign.”
Democrats argue that the FISA Court judges should have been able to figure out, from that obscure description, that the DNC and Clinton campaign paid for the dossier. That seems a pretty weak argument, but in any case, the Nunes memo’s statement that the FISA application did not disclose or reference the role of the DNC and the Clinton campaign is undeniably true.

But see how much longer it takes to say that? People who read that first article in NY magazine only will almost certainly not see anything amiss in the author’s assertion that the FISA application proved Nunes wrong, although in fact it proves the exact opposite.

The AP gets into the propaganda act as well. That article I just linked was written by John Hinderaker of Powerline, and he says:

With the AP, it is often hard to tell whether we are dealing with malice or ignorance.

It’s the old “knave or fool” question. But in the case of these distortions by the AP and others, I think we can safely say “malice” as well as “tactical lying.” My reason for saying that is that it’s not easy to write stuff like that; it takes effort and skill. The “mistakes” aren’t simple ones or intuitive ones. It is necessary to twist the facts in a fairly convoluted way to get there. And although I tend to think it’s wise to never ascribe to malice what can be ascribed to simple incompetence or ignorance, incompetence (or ignorance) is not what’s going on here.

http://www.neoneocon.com/2018/07/23/the-fisa-application-nunes-was-right-and-its-not-andrew-c-mccarthys-fbi-anymore/

DEVIN NUNES VINDICATED

BY SCOTT JOHNSON IN FISAGATE, HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, RUSSIA INVESTIGATION

The Department of Justice released a highly redacted version of the FISA warrant applications on Carter Page in its Saturday night document dump. I posted the FISA warrant documents here.

This past February House Intelligence Committee Chariman Devin Nunes released an important memo on the FISA warrant documents (embedded below). Prominent Democrats and their media adjunct defamed Nunes as a liar. After the release of the FISA warrant documents on Saturday as redacted, Byron York conceived the brilliant idea of checking the documents against the Nunes memo. Who’s zoomin’ who?

In his Washington Examiner column on the FISA warrant documents, Byron marches paragraph by paragraph through the Nunes memo. Byron declares in conclusion: “Parts of the Nunes memo, like references to the Strzok-Page texts or Bruce Ohr’s testimony, contain information that was not in the application. But that does not make it any less accurate. The bottom line is that, whatever the criticism it has received, the Nunes memo was almost entirely accurate. The release of the FISA application supports that view.”

Byron refrains from expressing judgment on “Democrats and some in the press” who “denounced [the Nunes memo] as a collection of lies and mischaracterizations.” He leaves the intelligent reader to draw his own conclusions.

HMTG-115-IG00-20180129-SD001 by Scott Johnson on Scribd

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Soviets, Democrats, and the Captive Soul

Soviets, Democrats, and the Captive Soul 
By Sally Zelikovsky 

Years ago, we flew into Newark airport in New Jersey after almost three years living abroad as expats -- mostly in St. Petersburg, Russia.  (I realize that in today’s McCarthyesque environment with Robert Mueller at the head of the new Unamerican Activities Committee, that experience could land me in solitary confinement), but back then it was an “emerging market” and we were explorers on that frontier.  While it was a dark, cold, and lonely experience, it was one that I would do again in a heartbeat. It was living amongst the Russians that I got a glimpse into their soul through what I saw as “schizophrenic” eyes -- starving for products, stocked store shelves, decent food, shoes that fit, and mostly, the freedom to come and go as they please, vote as they please, and express themselves as they please without the iron fist and heavy boot of the State; and thrilled that the Soviet Empire had collapsed. While so many of them recognized the burden that now lay upon them -- to create a freer society than the one they inhabited for the last seventy-some years, and one that embraced capitalism as opposed to Marxism -- far too many others saw their new reality as a slap in their Slavic faces.  After all, they were a superpower!  Their man got into space first, they beat back the Nazis, they were more educated and cultured, they dominated the classical music and ballet world, cleaned up in Olympic after Olympic, and had vast natural resources that allowed them to be a nation unto itself without any need for anything from the outside world (except good ideas and groundbreaking innovations and, never mind the fact that they couldn’t extract most of those resources safely from the ground or bring them to market).  Not only that, they were smarter than the stupid Americans. 
These Russians were disgusted that the Americans, liberty, and capitalism had won the Cold War.  They never expected to be defeated and yet, here they were on the ash heap of history.  They were resentful and fiercely nationalistic with a pride that went beyond patriotism.  They dug in their heels waiting for a leader who wasn’t the American quisling Yeltsin was. I also had a front seat view of the vestiges of (Soviet) communism.  Creativity and innovation, apart from needs dictated by the state and the innovation that required, had been stifled for so long that, that in some ways, it wasn’t part of their cultural fabric anymore.  Comrades continued to accept the continued emptiness on store shelves.  Many lacked the ingenuity and initiative required to take care of things that the omnipotent State usually took care of.  That reminds me of the elderly couple on a 5thfloor walkup whose elevator had broken down.  It had been months since they could go downstairs and shop.  Every day fellow apartment dwellers brought them food.  It never occurred to any of them to find someone to repair the elevator and pay for it out of their own pockets.  They just waited for the “State” to come and fix it.  And so they waited for a new leader who would restore Russian pride and dominance.  In the meantime, those vast resources remained underutilized and wide open for exploitation and control by unsavory thugs. The stronger this mafia grew, the greater presence they had in every aspect of the everyday lives of your average ex-Soviet.  The wealthier and more influential the oligarchs became, these relics of the Soviet Empire became even more resentful of the West, its puny ideals and irrelevant values.  It didn’t take long for them to embrace the strongmen because they stocked the shelves and brought petrol to the gas stations and restored pride.  This is how a guy like Putin came to and remains in power; this is why most Russians embraced the invasions of Eastern Ukraine, Crimea, and Georgia. I saw the liberal-progressive-Marxist-socialist mind crushed by policies that benefitted the few and hurt the most.  I saw the Soviet soul reduced almost to nonexistence -- where nobody cared when a little boy was disemboweled by some monster, donations for orphans never made it to the orphans but were pilfered and sold by the workers in the orphanages, and speeding motorists unemotionally ran over whoever was in their way crossing the street, including little old ladies and kids.  I saw an
7/24/2018 Soviets, Democrats, and the Captive Soul
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/07/soviets_democrats_and_the_captive_soul.html 2/3
angry population so used to hard times and heavy-handed leadership from Tsars to Bolsheviks to Commissars to Premiers, and so heavily propagandized, that when the gift horse of freedom was finally thrust upon them, they could only look at its mouth. 
They had to blame someone for their woes.  So, they blamed the Americans -- at the time, their corporate benefactors, and also the victors. These observations played a huge role when I “walked away” from being a registered Democrat who reflexively voted without much thought.  And it all came rushing in as we approached the landing strip at EWR.  It was a clear day and I had a solid view of the city of Newark where my father was born.  I thought about that city and the other municipalities of New Jersey and the many communities scattered across the fruited plains that were run by Democrats, had significant minority populations, and had been funneled billions of taxpayer dollars to fight Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty -- not to mention billions in charitable donations through a multitude or organizations that promised to do good -- and I realized something.  All that money accomplished very little because it really did just keep “the black man” in his place, in the ghetto, in underperforming schools, on the dole, on bread lines waiting for his handout from the master -- the Democratic Party.  The Democrats would funnel as much money as they could to look as if they were helping people when they just continued to enslave them.  Their policies didn’t help the majority of blacks in these communities; it just perpetuated the status quo, and actually things got worse as literacy rates declined, and single motherhood, the incarceration of young men, and drug trafficking and abuse, got worse. These communities and the Democrats who created them needed a scapegoat. That scapegoat has two heads:  one is white and the other is conservative.    I know as a Trump supporter, a Tea Partier, a white person, a conservative, and a Republican, I am ipso facto a racist, but in the airplane then, and to this very day, I promise you that is not the America I want for America’s blacks.  And I don’t know any people from any of these demographics that feel that way either.  We want all Americans to do well, to thrive, to achieve their dreams.  We want the least amount of government with the most amount of liberty for all Americans and all of those striving to become Americans, legally. The notion that we hate blacks, want to oppress them, lock ‘em all up in chains is just a figment of the Democrats’ collective imagination.  It is a myth (fake news, if you will) perpetuated by the media, our schools, our houses of worship, and the pop culture.  It is a mantra created by Democrats to foment discord, resentment, and chaos; to generate votes for DNC candidates and policies; and to create crises that are ripe for them to exploit to garner more votes.    We really don’t need the Russians to sow the seeds of discord when we have the Democrats.  Whoopie Goldberg told Judge Jeanine Pirro in a rage on “The View” that she never saw anyone [like Trump] “whip up such hate”  or “be so dismissive” or who “whips up people to beat other people.”  She kicked her off the show and told her to get the F out of the building -following marching orders from Maxine Waters to harass Trump supporters.  Methinks thou doth protesteth too much, Whoopie.  It is the Democrats, their machine, their policies, and their intolerant hate groups that lather up the crowds and turn to violence.   Some black Americans are waking up and walking away (Whoopie isn’t one of them) and I have a big grin on my face when I say that.  Knowing you have a problem and admitting it is the first step towards a better life, towards enjoying all those freedoms the Democrats keep promising but rarely deliver on.  What is the problem for poor rural and inner city black Americans? 
7/24/2018 Soviets, Democrats, and the Captive Soul
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/07/soviets_democrats_and_the_captive_soul.html 3/3
Dependence that has been cultivated over decades on the handout in exchange for a vote that only benefits the party and the candidates and leaves average Joes way behind. Trump won because he listened to the people, to the Tea Party, to the grassroots, to the disgruntled Democrats voting for Bernie.  He listened to black mothers looking for better schools for their children.  He heard the legal immigrants who saw the injustice of open borders.  He paid attention to the 92 million Americans of all races, creeds and religions who had stopped looking for work because of Obama’s policies. And then he made promises that he actually kept!  He has exposed the leftwing agenda and shown average Americans how a more limited yet more responsive government can work for us.  He exposed the double standard in the media, the academy, and the culture.  He has thrown chum to the sharks who take the bait and, in their feeding frenzy, reveal just how much they despise the average American, the legal immigrant, the entrepreneur, blue-collar workers, the military, law enforcement, and anyone who isn’t in their power base or who defies the hand that feeds them -- if you are Jewish, black, Hispanic, gay, in a union, or educated, you are the worst kind of traitor if you’ve gone to the Dark Side of Conservatism. Trump and his supporters, including those who have walked away, will continue to reject Democrat policies  that establish a new normal for America where a robust GDP, security, prosperity, and our jobs are a thing of the past.  Nor will they be assuaged by promises that what we lost we will gain back being part of a global economy, an evolving culture, and a society of open borders.   Trump's America understands that the Democrat's America will look more like Putin's Russia where wealthy, connected, elites rule, and the deplorables are forgotten.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/07/soviets_democrats_and_the_captive_soul.html

The Kazakh Famine of the 1930s: another “Harvest of Sorrow”

The Kazakh Famine of the 1930s: another “Harvest of Sorrow”
New Class Traitor History,Politics democide, genocide, Holodomor,Kazakhstan collectivization campaign, Kazakhstan famine, totalitarian collectivism, victims of communism
Continuing the theme of this sad day, I will share a story I just learned about. In this video from the Library of Congress, Sarah Cameron summarizes her forthcoming book: “The Hungry Steppe: Famine, Violence, and the Making of Soviet Kazakhstan“.

In this video from the Library of Congress, Sarah Cameron summarizes her forthcoming book: “The Hungry Steppe: Famine, Violence, and the Making of Soviet Kazakhstan“.

There are some similarities with the Holodomor (subject of Robert Conquest’s famous book, “The Harvest of Sorrow”) in that a forced collectivization campaign led to a massive man-made famine in a region that under normal circumstances was a major food exporter.  

There are some similarities with the Holodomor (subject of Robert Conquest’s famous book, “The Harvest of Sorrow”) in that a forced collectivization campaign led to a massive man-made famine in a region that under normal circumstances was a major food exporter.  While you could say the Ukraine was the breadbasket of the USSR, Kazakhstan was its stockyard. Unlike the Ukrainian peasants that fells victim to the dekulakization campaign, however, the Kazakhs were nomads, whose lifestyle was adapted to raising livestock in a vast territory of marginal land. Unlike in the case of the Ukraine SSR, a desire to stamp out Kazakh national identity and aspirations does not appear to have played a role as such. Furthermore, nomads did not fit any class category in “scientific” Marxism — but eventually the know-it-all social engineers in Moscow decided that the “backward” nation needed to be modernized, the nomads forcibly settled, and animal husbandry brought more in line with “modern” practices. The result was disastrous — the number of cattle fell by 90%, and deaths from starvation were actually a higher percentage of ethnic Kazakhs than had been reached even in the Ukraine (where absolute numbers were of course larger). Combined with the flight of about another million Kazakhs to neighboring Soviet republics or to China, this actually made ethnic Kazakhs a minority in Kazakhstan until 1999. Eventually, the Soviets were forced to backtrack. Their satrap in Kazakhstan, erstwhile co-executioner of the Tsar and his family Filipp Goloshchekin, was made a scapegoat and dismissed, but his protégé (and alleged former lover) Nikolai Yezhov — head of the NKVD during the Great Purges, which are known in Russian as the “Yezhovshchina” to this day — ensured he stayed unharmed. Only after Yezhov’s downfall and execution did Goloshchekin’s turn come: he was eventually executed by firing squad at Kuibyshev (Soviet-era name of Samara) as part of a group of “especially dangerous prisoners”. During the Q&A, Dr. Cameron was, of course, asked why this episode is barely known in the West, while there is at least some awareness (not enough) of the Holodomor. She attributes this to the large Ukrainian diaspora in the West vs. the barely existent Kazakh one, as well as to the fact that Kazakh nomadic culture prizes oral history over the written word and stone memorials. (Dr. Cameron recounts that, when she asked where a monument to the victims had been built, she was told “in Almaty” [the former capital] and spent days touring the city, only to find a sign indicating a such a monument would be built there in the future.) The language barrier presumably plays a role too: Russian speakers can generally read Ukrainian (the two languages are closer than Dutch and German), but the Turkic Kazakh language is another matter. (Kazakhstan itself, meanwhile, has been transformed radically, with the discovery and exploitation of vast natural resources (including but not limited to both oil and uranium). Since the 2000s, the country has seen very rapid economic growth, slowed down recently by a dip in world oil prices.) As great and appalling as I knew the body count of communism to be, the story of the Kazakh man-made famine was new to me. There is scholarly discussion about whether it constitutes a genocide (which implies intent to decimate or eliminate an ethnic group) or a democide (a mass killing of genocidal proportions with motivated other than ethnicity). But for the victims and their kin, it would be cold comfort that they died as the results of a colossal deadly foul-up rather than deliberate intent. Whether they died from premeditated murder or from “Depraved indifference to human life”, if you like. 

https://spinstrangenesscharm.wordpress.com/2018/07/22/the-kazakh-famine-of-the-1930s-another-harvest-of-sorrow/

OUR UNDER-INCARCERATION PROBLEM, ATLANTA EDITION

BY PAUL MIRENGOFF IN CRIME, LIBERALS, SENTENCING REFORM

When he was 14 years-old, Jayden Myrick was arrested for armed robbery. He agreed in a plea deal to a 15 year sentence. The final seven years were to be served in adult prison.

But after just two-and-half years in juvenile detention, Fulton County Superior Court Judge Doris Downs set Myrick free. She put him on probation and placed him in a special program whose director claimed could keep tabs on Myrick and reform him.

Now, Myrick, age 17, is accused of shooting and killing a 34 year-old Washington, D.C. man during the course of another armed robbery, as the man was waiting for an Uber ride after leaving a wedding reception in Atlanta. Christian Broder is survived by his wife and a 9-month-old daughter. He would be alive today if Judge Downs hadn’t stupidly subscribed to the tenets of those pushing sentencing reform.

The judge explained that Myrick “has been in prison now for two and a half years and I don’t think it helped him much, I haven’t noticed a whole lot a change.” Lost on the judge, as on many sentencing reform advocates, was the fact that the primary purpose of putting Myrick away was to protect society from his menace, not to help him.

The key fact about Myrick’s time in detention was that he hadn’t committed any felonies, not that he hadn’t changed.

To “change” Myrick, Judge Downs placed him in a program called Visions Unlimited. Its director assured the judge that Myrick would be subject to a “very, very structured” plan that would include education, career readiness, and life skills to get away from criminal thinking. This is the same sweet-sounding recipe used by the “evidence-based” rehabilitation programs touted by the lenient sentencing crew.

The judge told Myrick, “I am expecting you to become a changed person” through the program. She thus assumed (1) that hard cases like Myrick quickly can become “a changed person” and (2) that Myrick cared what the judge was expecting.

Both assumptions were idiotic. Notwithstanding Visions Unlimited “very, very structured program,” Myrick promptly began putting posts on Instagram posts showing him with guns, known gang members, and a a baggie of pills for sale.

The DA asked that Myrick’s probation be revoked. Judge Downs ordered Myrick back to jail, but only until February.

On February 21, Myrick was released. He was supposed to go back into the Visions Unlimited program but, predictably, did not report.

The DA’s office said it found more posts on Instagram showing that Myrick was violating his probation and reported this to the the judge. She took no further action in response.

Thus, Myrick was free to take the life of Christian Broder. This was a murder waiting to happen.

Judge Downs is Exhibit A in the case for mandatory minimum sentences. They limit the ability of foolish judges to give lenient sentences, as routinely happened in the bad old, crime-riddled days before the mandatory minimums.

Jayden Myrick is Exhibit A in the case against snake-oil claims that rehabilitation programs can be expected to create “changed persons.” Programs rarely change people. It’s the passionate internal desire to change that produces change. . .sometimes.

This is the main fallacy of proposals to induce prisoners into “evidence-based” rehabilitation programs by reducing sentences in exchange for participating. Most of those who participate do so in order to reduce their prison time. A prisoner who passionately wants to change will participate in a rehabilitation program without the inducement, assuming he has reason to believe the program isn’t just BS.

Myrick wasn’t interested in changing. He was interesting in getting back on the street to commit more crime. In Judge Downs, he found a sucker who would put him back. Christian Broder is dead as a result.

Judges need less discretion to inflict this dreadful kind of harm, not more.

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2018/07/our-under-incarceration-problem-atlanta-edition.php

WHAT DO VOTERS CARE ABOUT? ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION, FOR ONE THING

BY JOHN HINDERAKER IN IMMIGRATION

The post immediately below addresses the fact that voters don’t care much about the Democrats’ Helsinki hysteria. Most voters, I think, are smart enough to understand that Donald Trump, unlike his predecessor, is unabashedly pro-America. Thus, the Left’s insane claim that he committed “treason” by not denouncing Vladimir Putin in a public forum convinces no one, especially since the news outlets promoting that attack cheered Barack Obama’s give-away-the-store approach enthusiastically. The average American may not be brilliant, but he isn’t that stupid.

That said, what do voters care about? Illegal immigration, for one thing. Here again, the Democrats have mostly misfired. Their “separated children” campaign–which was exquisitely coordinated with virtually every newspaper and television network in America, I give them credit for that–fell rather flat. Most people are much more concerned about the many adverse impacts of illegal immigration on our country.

Crimes by illegal immigrants are just one issue among several; lower wages for unskilled and semi-skilled Americans is another. But crime grabs headlines, so this Judicial Watch survey is highly relevant: “Busy Month for Illegal Immigrants Committing Heinous Crimes.”

As the separation of families pouring in from Mexico dominates the airwaves several disturbing cases involving illegal aliens shift the focus back to the devastating impact of America’s poorly guarded southern border. In the last few days alone, an illegal immigrant who had been deported eleven times attacked his wife with a chainsaw in front of their children, another got charged with a series of violent rapes and dozens were arrested for operating a major human and drug smuggling enterprise in a major U.S. city.

The gruesome chainsaw attack occurred in Los Angeles County, which has long offered illegal immigrants sanctuary. A man named Alejandro Alvarez-Villegas, deported to his native Mexico 11 times since 2005, tried to kill his wife with a chainsaw.

Deported 11 times? I never know how to interpret such news accounts. Was he actuallydeported, i.e. taken to the border and sent on his way, or just ordered deported? Deportation orders are generally ignored, as I understand it.

Several hundred miles north in San Francisco, an illegal immigrant from Peru recently got charged with rape by force or violence and other crimes. The 37-year-old, Orlando Vilchez Lazo, was a driver for the ride-sharing company Lyft who somehow passed a background check. Lazo faces life in prison and is being held in jail in San Francisco on $4.2 million bail. San Francisco has long provided illegal aliens with sanctuary and forbids it law enforcement agencies from cooperating with federal immigration officials. … Back in 2008 Judicial Watch investigated the SFSD’s handling of an illegal alien (Edwin Ramos) charged with the triple murder of three innocent American citizens. Ramos, who had been arrested on three prior occasions and convicted with two felonies, was never turned over to federal immigration authorities for removal to his native El Salvador under San Francisco’s sanctuary policies.

“Sanctuary” policies are, perhaps, the single greatest scandal in 21st century America. Admittedly, the competition is stiff.

In the other recent case involving serious illegal immigrant criminal activity, 18 human smugglers and 117 illegal aliens got arrested in three stash houses in the area surrounding El Paso, Texas and southern New Mexico. Most of the illegal aliens—93—are from Mexico and the rest from Guatemala (12), Honduras (6), Brazil (3), El Salvador (2) and Peru (1). At least three of the illegal immigrants have serious criminal records, according to information released by ICE. A 32-year-old Mexican man busted in the ring has convictions for child endangerment and driving while intoxicated as well as being arrested for illegally re-entering the U.S. after being deported. A 30-year-old Mexican has ties to a drug cartel and was previously arrested for fraud and misuse of visas. A 34-year-old Guatemalan has an outstanding warrant in Florida for driving under the influence and has also been charged with illegally re-entering the U.S. after deportation, according to the feds.

Besides arresting the criminal elements, the feds also seized more than 1,000 pounds of marijuana in the El Paso bust, large amounts of U.S. and Mexican cash, nine vehicles and three tractor-trailers.

The litany goes on and on. Reading these accounts, I always wonder: have we become the dumbest country in world history? A nation without borders won’t be a nation for long.

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2018/07/what-do-voters-care-about-illegal-immigration-for-one-thing.php

Caroline Glick on the reaction to Trump’s Helsinki remarks

Caroline Glick on the reaction to Trump’s Helsinki remarks

In her article on the subject, Glick appears to agree with me on what Trump was trying to do:

Trump tried to strike a balance. He spoke respectfully of both Putin’s denials and the US intelligence community’s accusation. It wasn’t a particularly coherent position. It was a clumsy attempt to preserve the agreements he and Putin reached during their meeting.
And it was blindingly obviously not treason.
In fact, Trump’s response to Lemire, and his overall conduct at the press conference, did not convey weakness at all.

Lemire is the AP reporter who asked the “gotcha question.”

But Glick takes her analysis further:

In Obama’s first summit with Putin in July 2009, Obama sat meekly as Putin delivered an hour-long lecture about how US-Russian relations had gone down the drain.
As Daniel Greenfield noted at Frontpage magazine Tuesday, in succeeding years, Obama capitulated to Putin on anti-missile defense systems in Poland and the Czech Republic, on Ukraine, Georgia and Crimea. Obama gave Putin free rein in Syria and supported Russia’s alliance with Iran on its nuclear program and its efforts to save the Assad regime. He permitted Russian entities linked to the Kremlin to purchase a quarter of American uranium. And of course, Obama made no effort to end Russian meddling in the 2016 elections.
TRUMP IN contrast has stiffened US sanctions against Russian entities. He has withdrawn from Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran. He has agreed to sell Patriot missiles to Poland. And he has placed tariffs on Russian exports to the US.
So if Trump is Putin’s agent, what was Obama?

But that was then. This is now. And the reason behind the reaction of Trump’s opponents is quite obvious: impeachment. To get there, they must drum up the most outrageous charges against him, state them with vehemence and conviction and near-unanimity, and count on both the ignorance and/or the animus towards Trump of enough US voters in November to elect a Democratic-dominated House and pave the way for a successful impeachment vote.

As Glick writes:

To objective observers, the allegation that Trump betrayed the United States by equivocating in response to a rude question about Russian election interference is ridiculous on its face. But Democratic election strategists have obviously concluded that it is catnip for the Democratic faithful. For them it serves as a dog whistle…
But by embracing Brennan’s claim of treason, Pelosi, Hoyer, Schumer and other top Democrats are winking and nodding to the progressive radicals now rising in their party. They are telling the Linda Sarsours and Cynthia Nixons of the party that they will impeach Trump if they win control of the House of Representatives.

Indeed.

One thing I’ve never completely understood is why a party would want to impeach a president if they don’t know they have enough votes in the Senate to convict that president. That’s the higher bar, as the GOP discovered when they tried Clinton. Yes, I realize they believe that impeachment weakens a president, and it certainly distracts any president subject to it. Do they think Trump would voluntarily resign if impeached? I certainly don’t think so. Do they think they would get a Senate conviction because enough Republicans would vote with them? Perhaps.

Glick goes on to list all the ways that this campaign by Trump’s opponents weakens us in foreign affairs. It’s well worth reading the whole thing.

But Trump’s opponents do not care about that. Many of them would dearly love to weaken us on the world stage, and the rest are so consumed by their Trump-hatred that nothing else matters to them.

http://www.neoneocon.com/2018/07/20/caroline-glick-on-the-reaction-to-trumps-helsinki-remarks/

The Democrats' Russian Sex Change Operation

The Democrats' Russian Sex Change Operation BY ROGER L SIMON JULY 20, 2018

The Democrats have had the equivalent of a sex change operation over Russia. It would make for an hilarious black comedy were it not for the dangerous implications for the safety of the human race — not to mention the increasingly disastrous miseducation of our youth.
In fact, this sex change is so extreme it should make even a card-carrying LGBTQQP2SAA blush.
Take our erstwhile senator from Vermont, Comrade Bernie, even now off touring the country with the latest "progressive" fave, a socialist with the apparent knowledge base of one of those clueless dimbulbs chosen for satiric man-on-the-street TV interviews.
Bernie, as many know, is a man who picked the Soviet Union for his honeymoon. As one who paid two lengthy visits to the USSR at about the same time on "cultural exchanges," I can assure you that most of us would rather spend our honeymoons at a toxic waste dump, which a significant part of that country resembled and still does.

Not only that, on those two visits — and also on two subsequent trips postCommunism — I noticed the most obvious income disparity, something Senator Sanders is supposed to abhor. Yes, we have pretty wretched poverty in Appalachia and the inner cities, but this was pervasive, with all the clichés about empty stores with babushka ladies on breadlines one hundred percent accurate. I saw it for myself from Khanty-Mansiysk, Siberia to Simferopol, Crimea. It's slightly better now under oligarchic capitalism, but still nothing like the West.
It's one thing to excuse the naive idealism of Lincoln Steffens, who returned from Moscow in 1918 to tell us, "I have seen the future and it works." But Sanders went on his Soviet honeymoon in 1988, fifteen years after the publication of The Gulag Archipelago. How romantic.
If there were ever a place where elites (nomenklatura) ruled and the sainted proletariat got the short end of the proverbial stick, it was the USSR. Further, all the visitors to the Soviet Union, and many later, were under constant surveillance by intelligence agencies. I know I was — oh, how I was — since I was approached by the KGB to "help them," a moment as terrifying as any in my life. (You can read about it here.) Spying has been a Russian constant since the czars.
Only willfully blind true believers could have ignored all of that, but Bernie Sanders did.
And now he's yammering on that Trump is betraying us to Russia. As if.
But he's not half as bad or half as hypocritical as ex-CIA chief John O. Brennan.

Brennan — it is well known and he admits it — voted for Communist Party USA chief Gus Hall in the 1976 presidential election. Talk about sex change operations. He excuses that as kind of youthful indiscretion — he was in his early twenties — and evidently many (including Obama, who gave him his job) believed him or said they did.
But I was only a few years older than Brennan then and remember those days well, since I too was on the left. I was even an acquaintance of such notorious characters as Abbie Hoffman and Tom Hayden and knew dozens of people who, to one degree or another, sympathized with them. Yet not a single person I can recall voted for Gus Hall or even remotely considered it. Hall was a Stalinist, for crissakes! He was anathema, everything the young people of the so-called New Left were rebelling against then — and, in this one case at least, justifiably so. The mass-murdering crimes of Stalin were already common knowledge.
Years later, when I read Brennan was among the minuscule .07 percent who actually votedfor Hall, I was astonished. How could such a person end up director of the CIA? I mean, I'm all for redemption and everything, but there are limits. Voting for a Stalinist candidate as late as 1976 would be akin to a personality disorder, almost like voting for Satan. It's one thing to forgive Brennan for this, hard as that may be, but there is something seriously unsettling about putting him at the helm of our most famous intelligence agency. (Other questions have arisen about Brennan's Middle East connections.)
But now we have him leading the charge against Trump, accusing the president of actual treason in his dealings with Putin, the very thing Brennan's former hero Hall directly advocated. It's enough to make a sane man paranoid.

This is all obviously part of the great game of "Russia" that has dominated our culture for nearly two years, a kind of media- generated obsessive-compulsive disorder. (Mentioning Russia has become the cable TV equivalent of the uncontrollable washing of hands in a Dickens novel.) This has to end — and now — or we'll all go crazy, paranoid or not.
To do this, what we need more than ever is for Trump to exercise his executive authority and order the release of all the documents pertaining to the Hilary email and Russia investigations that the DOJ is refusing to produce. I have heard the president's attorneys oppose this for fear of some bogus obstruction charge. I'm afraid it's too late for that. The public has to see it all — and not, alas, through the filtered eyes of an inspector general. Trust is gone. We need the originals. And no phony redactions, please.
Meanwhile, the Democrats' evolving RussiaDerangement Syndrome — a viral mutation of TDS — is indeed a psychological disease worthy of inclusion in the DSM, especially since it has nothing whatever to do with Russia. Russia is always the same. The Democrats are not. They have had a sex change operation.
ENVOI: It's worth remembering, however, that many of those who have such operations often have second thoughts and want them reversed. In this case, the Dems might be well advised to do so, go back to their old appeasing ways that began under Reagan and reached their apotheosis under Obama. Their new found belligerence is clearly not catching fire. The public seems mighty bored with the whole Russia business and judges it completely irrelevant to their lives, a mere asterisk, less than one percent in the latest polling of important campaign issues. Who can blame them.

BASIC INSTINCTS

BY PAUL MIRENGOFF IN DEMOCRATS, FOREIGN POLICY, RUSSIA

Nicholas Frankovich at NRO writes:

Foreign-policy veterans of past Republican administrations figure disproportionately in the ranks of prominent conservatives who have checked out of the GOP since 2016. Some have concluded in good faith that the foreign-policy instincts of the Democratic party are less incompatible [than President Trump’s] with America’s best interest. To Republicans who chide them for party disloyalty, they answer that loyalty to country takes precedence.

Republican foreign policy veterans who prefer the Democrats’ foreign policy instincts to President Trump’s may have, in most cases, reached their conclusion in good faith. But the conclusion is untenable. These veterans are to be chided not for party disloyalty, but for terrible judgment and/or bad memory.

“Whataboutism” — the tendency to answer criticism of President Trump by pointing to President Obama’s follies and asking “what about them” — is a poor defense of Trump. But it is the proper response to any claim that the Democratic party’s foreign policy instincts are more compatible with American interests than those of the current president.

What part of Obama’s Russia policy was compatible with American interests? Doing Putin’s bidding on missile defense systems for Poland and the Czech Republic? Ceding control of the Syrian skies to Russia? Farming out to Putin enforcement of the so-called red line on Assad using chemical weapons? Ridiculing Mitt Romney for saying that Russia is a major geo-political threat (words matter, as Trump’s critics remind us)? Doing precious little to help Ukraine fend off Russian aggression?

For that matter, what about President Obama’s reaction to Russian interference in the election? He says he told Putin to “knock it off.” That, apparently, was it.

Moving beyond the subject of Russia, if that’s still permitted, what about Obama’s Iran policy. Did it serve our interests to enrich an enemy regime bent on dominating the Middle East? What did we get in exchange? Promises, breakable at any time, that Iran won’t develop nukes for about decade?

What about Israel? Obama was openly hostile towards our best friend in the region. Mistakenly assuming, probably for ideological reasons, that Israel was mainly to blame for the lack of a peace agreement, he tried to coerce our ally into making major concessions in exchange for virtually nothing. His instincts were terrible.

What about Iraq? Obama’s pullout paved the way for ISIS, which he dismissed as the jayvee, and the horror and terrorism that ensued.

What about defense spending? Democrats live to cut the Department of Defense budget, thereby weakening our military and our country. Trump has boosted defense spending significantly, thereby strengthening our military and making America more capable of thwarting our enemies and promoting peace.

Against Obama’s horrendous record, of which the above recitation is only a part, what can the GOP foreign establishment cite to support the view that Democratic foreign policy instincts are better than Trump’s? The fact that Obama got along well with Angela Merkel? It’s easy to get along with the leader of an ally when you wink at her failure to meet her country’s obligations to NATO, thus weakening the alliance’s ability to counter. . .Russia.

In this post, I have equated Obama’s foreign policy with the foreign policy of the Democrats. That’s not an unreasonable approach, but it may be too charitable to the Dems. The Democratic party has moved leftward since the end of the Obama presidency.

We’ll see whom the Democrats nominate for president in two years. It might be Joe Biden — hardly the worst case scenario — who stood behind Obama on all foreign policy issues and would not be able, given the party’s base, to adopt more centrist positions in the unlikely event that he wanted to.

Biden has been wrong about almost every important foreign policy issue — and Russia/the Soviet Union in particular — for as long as anyone can remember. Talk about terrible instincts!

More likely the nominee will be a hard leftist, someone like Kamala Harris, who would make Obama look like a centrist on foreign, as well as domestic, policy.

Would foreign policy veterans of past Republican administrations support such a candidate? If so, Trump derangement syndrome will be the correct diagnosis.

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2018/07/basic-instincts.php