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| Federal prosecutors said the woman, Elena Alekseevna Khusyaynova, 44, of St.
Petersburg, was involved in an effort “to spread distrust towards
candidates for U.S. political office and the U.S. political
system.” The conspirators seized on divisions in American politics, prosecutors said, including immigration, guns, race relations, women and even the debate over the protests by National Football League players during the national anthem. No one was named in court papers besides Ms. Khusyaynova. All americans and immigrants of all minority-majority-identity-misidentified-species confused-molested by priests/rabbis/atheists/pundit-nit-wits and political leaders who have been breast fed well into middle age are strongly urged to believe this story . |
Friday, October 19, 2018
OMG! OH MY GOD! OMG! etc
Wednesday, October 10, 2018
Whatever It Takes
by Ann Coulter
www.anncoulter.com
The Democrats' current position on the Supreme Court nomination of Judge Brett Kavanaugh is: We cannot have someone addicted to beer on our highest court! What if a foreign power were to ply him with this nectar in a can? Talk about taking control of our government! Suppose they throw in a case of Weihenstephaner Hefeweissbier?
A bitter college roommate is going whole hog, wailing, He lied about being a beeraholic.
By the media's account, Kavanaugh was a bounder, a brawler and a drunk. And yet he still managed to graduate at the top of his class, go to Yale, then to Yale Law and work in the highest positions in government.
I am in awe of his manliness. Hemingway has nothing on this guy! He should be our president. To paraphrase Abraham Lincoln after being told Ulysses S. Grant was a drunk, let's find out what Kavanaugh drank and send a barrel of it to every college student. At least the Democrats have moved on from Crazy Ladies Who Must Be Believed.
Kavanaugh's first accuser, Christine Blasey Ford, doesn't remember the time or place of the alleged high school groping, and all four witnesses she named deny any memory of such a party. (They don't deny anything; they simply don't remember the event Ford alleges occurred - ed.)
Forcing our first one-week delay, we were told that the poor lady was so traumatized by being groped in high school that she couldn't fly. It was the worst thing that ever happened to her, compelling her to do what any reasonable person would under the circumstances: Add a second front door to her house. She was supposedly terrified of small spaces, and an airplane, one of her friends told CNN, "was the ultimate closed space where you cannot get away."
Then we found out that Ford regularly jets off to Hawaii, Costa Rica, the South Pacific islands and French Polynesia . . . to go surfing, one of the most terrifying activities around.
It sounded like a joke. I was so shattered and broken, I could only go rock climbing in the Grand Tetons. After that, I'd repair to my room and curl up in a fetal position. Then I'd go rock climbing again.
An ex-boyfriend has come forward to say that in six years of dating Ford, she never mentioned a sexual assault, had no fear of flying, lived comfortably in a tiny home with only one front door, once coached a friend on how to take a polygraph, contrary to her sworn testimony - and also lied about stealing $600 from him.
Kavanaugh's second accuser, Deborah Ramirez, jumped in to help, dusting off a memory of the nominee pulling a Bill Clinton on her (pulling out his penis and putting it in her face - ed.) as a freshman in college - but only after she spent a week huddled with her attorney, "assessing her memories" and calling classmates to ask if they thought it was true.
And did she have corroboration? She doesn't need any! She's a 'survivor.' Even the New York Times - the newspaper that believed the Duke lacrosse rape case until about five minutes before the prosecutor was disbarred - said Ramirez didn't have enough evidence to meet its standards.
His third accuser, our heroine Julie Swetnik, is the woman produced by porn lawyer Michael Avenatti. She claims that she repeatedly attended gang rape parties in the 1980s - and she saw Brett Kavanaugh there!
An ex-boyfriend says Swetnik once threatened to kill him and his unborn child; she had a restraining order taken out against her; was sued by an employer for engaging in 'sexually offensive conduct,' making 'false and retaliatory allegations' against co-workers and also lying about her educational background and work history.
A Democrat and Emmy-winning meteorologist wrote a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee stating that, soon after he met Swetnik in the 1990s, she proposed group sex to him. Some years later her own father told him to stay away, citing Swetnik's psychological problems.
She is now the Democrats' leading contender for 2020.
Poor Kate Snow of NBC News thought she had landed the interview of a lifetime with Swetnik. Within about three questions, it became clear that she was talking to a lunatic. At that point, most of Snow's energy went into hoping for a building-wide power failure to shut down the cameras.
Of the four witnesses Swetnik provided to NBC, whom she claimed would confirm her story, one denied knowing any Julie Swetnik, one was dead, and two did not respond to the network, perhaps wishing they were dead, too.
By the end of the interview, Snow's purse was missing.
But the Democrats are energetic devils. They've been poring over Kavanaugh's high school yearbook and exclaiming, He's a beeraholic!
With grim passion, they say, how dare you laugh at this? If he were a teetotaler, they'd say, We can't have someone on the court who's so nerdy. How can this weird aesthete sympathize with murderers and insider traders?
They've already won a second week's delay by having two deranged women scream at Sen. Jeff Flake in an elevator.
After wetting himself, Flake insisted on a seventh FBI investigation. For weeks, the Democrats have been demanding an investigation - of an incident without witnesses, on a date unknown at a place unknown - by saying, Oh, you big babies, the FBI investigation of Anita Hill only took three days!
The FBI wrapped up its investigation of Kavanaugh in a few days and then sat around wondering how long it had to wait before producing the report. So now the "it will only take three days crowd" are saying, Keep investigating! We don't know how long the probe should be, but the minimum standards of decency require that it last at least until there's a new president.
Whatever they find, they will argue in the alternative and just keep doing it and doing it. If Kavanaugh stepped on a bug, PETA activists would be screaming at Flake in an elevator.
The Democrats have a pair of twos, but they expect Republicans to fold. Why? Because that's what Republicans always do!
Unfortunately, this time, Kavanaugh's supporters are not accepting surrender.
www.anncoulter.com
The Democrats' current position on the Supreme Court nomination of Judge Brett Kavanaugh is: We cannot have someone addicted to beer on our highest court! What if a foreign power were to ply him with this nectar in a can? Talk about taking control of our government! Suppose they throw in a case of Weihenstephaner Hefeweissbier?
A bitter college roommate is going whole hog, wailing, He lied about being a beeraholic.
By the media's account, Kavanaugh was a bounder, a brawler and a drunk. And yet he still managed to graduate at the top of his class, go to Yale, then to Yale Law and work in the highest positions in government.
I am in awe of his manliness. Hemingway has nothing on this guy! He should be our president. To paraphrase Abraham Lincoln after being told Ulysses S. Grant was a drunk, let's find out what Kavanaugh drank and send a barrel of it to every college student. At least the Democrats have moved on from Crazy Ladies Who Must Be Believed.
Kavanaugh's first accuser, Christine Blasey Ford, doesn't remember the time or place of the alleged high school groping, and all four witnesses she named deny any memory of such a party. (They don't deny anything; they simply don't remember the event Ford alleges occurred - ed.)
Forcing our first one-week delay, we were told that the poor lady was so traumatized by being groped in high school that she couldn't fly. It was the worst thing that ever happened to her, compelling her to do what any reasonable person would under the circumstances: Add a second front door to her house. She was supposedly terrified of small spaces, and an airplane, one of her friends told CNN, "was the ultimate closed space where you cannot get away."
Then we found out that Ford regularly jets off to Hawaii, Costa Rica, the South Pacific islands and French Polynesia . . . to go surfing, one of the most terrifying activities around.
It sounded like a joke. I was so shattered and broken, I could only go rock climbing in the Grand Tetons. After that, I'd repair to my room and curl up in a fetal position. Then I'd go rock climbing again.
An ex-boyfriend has come forward to say that in six years of dating Ford, she never mentioned a sexual assault, had no fear of flying, lived comfortably in a tiny home with only one front door, once coached a friend on how to take a polygraph, contrary to her sworn testimony - and also lied about stealing $600 from him.
Kavanaugh's second accuser, Deborah Ramirez, jumped in to help, dusting off a memory of the nominee pulling a Bill Clinton on her (pulling out his penis and putting it in her face - ed.) as a freshman in college - but only after she spent a week huddled with her attorney, "assessing her memories" and calling classmates to ask if they thought it was true.
And did she have corroboration? She doesn't need any! She's a 'survivor.' Even the New York Times - the newspaper that believed the Duke lacrosse rape case until about five minutes before the prosecutor was disbarred - said Ramirez didn't have enough evidence to meet its standards.
His third accuser, our heroine Julie Swetnik, is the woman produced by porn lawyer Michael Avenatti. She claims that she repeatedly attended gang rape parties in the 1980s - and she saw Brett Kavanaugh there!
An ex-boyfriend says Swetnik once threatened to kill him and his unborn child; she had a restraining order taken out against her; was sued by an employer for engaging in 'sexually offensive conduct,' making 'false and retaliatory allegations' against co-workers and also lying about her educational background and work history.
A Democrat and Emmy-winning meteorologist wrote a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee stating that, soon after he met Swetnik in the 1990s, she proposed group sex to him. Some years later her own father told him to stay away, citing Swetnik's psychological problems.
She is now the Democrats' leading contender for 2020.
Poor Kate Snow of NBC News thought she had landed the interview of a lifetime with Swetnik. Within about three questions, it became clear that she was talking to a lunatic. At that point, most of Snow's energy went into hoping for a building-wide power failure to shut down the cameras.
Of the four witnesses Swetnik provided to NBC, whom she claimed would confirm her story, one denied knowing any Julie Swetnik, one was dead, and two did not respond to the network, perhaps wishing they were dead, too.
By the end of the interview, Snow's purse was missing.
But the Democrats are energetic devils. They've been poring over Kavanaugh's high school yearbook and exclaiming, He's a beeraholic!
With grim passion, they say, how dare you laugh at this? If he were a teetotaler, they'd say, We can't have someone on the court who's so nerdy. How can this weird aesthete sympathize with murderers and insider traders?
They've already won a second week's delay by having two deranged women scream at Sen. Jeff Flake in an elevator.
After wetting himself, Flake insisted on a seventh FBI investigation. For weeks, the Democrats have been demanding an investigation - of an incident without witnesses, on a date unknown at a place unknown - by saying, Oh, you big babies, the FBI investigation of Anita Hill only took three days!
The FBI wrapped up its investigation of Kavanaugh in a few days and then sat around wondering how long it had to wait before producing the report. So now the "it will only take three days crowd" are saying, Keep investigating! We don't know how long the probe should be, but the minimum standards of decency require that it last at least until there's a new president.
Whatever they find, they will argue in the alternative and just keep doing it and doing it. If Kavanaugh stepped on a bug, PETA activists would be screaming at Flake in an elevator.
The Democrats have a pair of twos, but they expect Republicans to fold. Why? Because that's what Republicans always do!
Unfortunately, this time, Kavanaugh's supporters are not accepting surrender.
Monday, September 10, 2018
Donald Trump, Ann Coulter, and the Culture of Hysteria
As the establishment's coup d'etat against the democratically elected government of Donald Trump gathers momentum, readers are invited to read Ann Coulter's latest book (Resistance Is Futile: How The Trump-Hating Left Lost Its Collective Mind), which the author says is a "self-help book for liberals," though their hysteria about Trump will insure that few of them read it.
Psychologists have been treating "Trump anxiety" for some time now, and judging by the reaction of liberals to Coulter, they may soon have to treat Trump Tantrum Disorder as well. As Coulter points out, liberals have grown furiously unhinged by isolating themselves in self-righteous bubbles of Trump haters that exchange indignant comments about his latest outrages, most of which are simply imaginary.
For example, whenever the specter of American fascism is raised (every five minutes) we are told that Trump is a virtual Hitler clone. Uh, right. We all remember from our history books how Hitler went around boasting of his opportunities to grab women by the pussy, promising to replace the Treaty of Versailles with "something terrific," and engaging in fawning adulation of anyone he hoped to get something from. As Coulter puts it, "I don't remember Hitler or Stalin going around saying, 'These people are great. Incredible, outstanding, quality people.' And who in the WWII era would have described Hitler as Coulter describes Trump: '[He's] utterly undisciplined, runs his mouth, flatters everyone, and agrees with the last person he spoke to. Why, it's right out of the Mein Kampf playbook!"
The rage against Trump is proof that the election of 2016 never really ended. In her first post-election interview Hillary Clinton declared herself "part of the resistance," rather than the customary "loyal opposition." If Trump had lost and declared himself part of the anti-Clinton "resistance", Coulter notes, there would have been demands to put him in jail. "He's issuing a call to violence! 'Resistance' is a military term! It's a 'dog whistle' to the militias and the KKK!" Touché.
This attitude is simply a continuation of liberal hysteria during the campaign. Remember the Access Hollywood tape, somehow not a sleazy "October surprise" by the partisan media, which made no secret of its loathing of Trump? In spite of what was repeatedly claimed, there was no endorsement of sexual assault on the tape. Unless you are using a weapon, "they let you do it" means consent. Trump was simply uttering truisms about celebrity culture, not glorifying rape. Notes Coulter: "His whole point was to cite something axiomatically unacceptable - grabbing women by the P-word - in order to say that celebrity culture was so out of whack that a celebrity could get away with it." One could quibble with the "out of whack" part of the comment, as on the tape it appears that Trump in fact found this benefit of fame both natural and desirable. What needed to be explained was not this reaction of a life-long egomaniac, but the shocked indignation of the corporate media: after all, who knew that billionaires and other mega-stars enjoy sex on demand from beautiful women? Right, everyone. And as Coulter points out, Trump used the identical approach in saying his popularity was so great that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue without losing voter support. "That's not a confession, notes Coulter, "it's hyperbole." Nevertheless, she goes on, "Nexis can't perform a search for all the publications that have accused Trump of admitting to 'sexual assault,' because it retrieves too many documents." Long live fake news.
And while we're on the subject of fake news, how long has it been since Trump was last accused of being a racist? Five minutes? Surely we can do better than that. Don't let up for a minute on claims that he's giving aid and comfort to "white nationalists" and therefore obligated to condemn David Duke every three minutes and defend himself against the Southern Poverty Law Center, which has warned of an imminent neo-Nazi-KKK take-over of the U.S. on a more or less constant basis for nearly four decades.
The Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville a year ago has been regarded as the definitive proof of Trump's racism, though a New York Times reporter tweeted direct from the melee that left-wing Antifa protestors were just as aggressively violent as the racist right. Nevertheless, Trump's observation that there was violence (and "good people") "on both sides" has been used as confirmation of his alleged white supremacist sensibilities. By now, official memory has it that Antifa violence wasn't violence, and only "Nazis" were guilty of such. In one of her book's best lines, Coulter notes, "The more the rally recedes in time, the fresher a memory it becomes," which is an excellent description of all kinds of propaganda induced "memory." With all due regret for the death of Heather Heyer, we still don't know anything about the state of mind of the man who ran over her, who may have been in fear for his life, and few "journalists" are even curious about the matter.
But on to the alleged Trump-Russia collusion in the 2016 elections that is the main focus of Coulter's book. The basic allegation is that Trump, according to liberals a boundlessly incompetent buffoon, somehow managed to engage in a byzantine international conspiracy with Russian intelligence to steal the 2016 presidential election from Hillary Clinton. The original claim was that Russia hacked the e-mails of the DNC (after allegedly being invited to do so by Trump in a presidential debate with Clinton) and Hillary's aide John Podesta, then gave them to WikiLeaks, and that this somehow predictably benefited Trump. But why the Russians would have hacked the DNC to retrieve "lost" e-mails that were no longer on their server is difficult to explain. Furthermore, how could the Russians have had any assurance that the Podesta e-mails would end up helping Trump? That leak mostly hurt the DNC chairperson Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who was forced to resign.
More to the point, the Russian election meddling theme is simply a joke. The U.S. meddles in elections all the time, and when that fails, overthrows unwanted governments by force, often assassinating their democratic leaders as well. At William Blum's excellent archive at www.killinghope.org, you can read until your eyes bleed about the C.I.A. undermining democratic elections around the world going back seventy years. In recent years George Soros alone has repeatedly manipulated election outcomes in Georgia, the Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan, variously called the Orange revolution, the Tulip revolution, and the Rose revolution. And while we like to wax self-righteous about Russia interfering in our elections, we tend to forget that Boris Yeltsin would not likely have become president of Russia without a major intervention by the U.S. But perhaps the most ludicrous notion of all is that a relative handful of Russian bots posting on Facebook handed the election to Trump, which is like saying that a coke poured in the water supply prevented us from curing our diabetes epidemic.
The origin of the story alone should make us extremely skeptical about any Trump-Russia collusion, even apart from the absurd pretense that the U.S. has the moral standing to accuse others of such anti-democratic practices. Hillary Clinton invented the Russian collusion story in the summer of 2016 because she needed to neutralize the DNC's e-mails having shown up on WikiLeaks. This was a classic Clinton maneuver: whenever she is caught in a scandal she diverts attention to all-pervading imaginary enemies - misogynists, unscrupulous political opponents, racists, a vast right-wing conspiracy, and now, Russia and Donald Trump.
So Clinton campaign chairman Robby Mook went on ABC's This Week with George Stephanopoulos to tell the world about the Russian conspiracy on July 24, 2016, the eve of the Democratic National Convention. "Experts are telling us that Russian state actors broke into the DNC, took all these emails and now are leaking them out through these Web sites . . .. And it's troubling that some experts are now telling us that this was done by - by the Russians for the purpose of helping Donald Trump." The anonymous reference to "some experts" has not been cleared up to this day.
Of course, Hillary Clinton would have preferred to spin a web of conspiracy around Trump and ISIS or Trump and North Korea, but Trump didn't have business interests with either of them, so she revved up a new Cold War instead. She somehow managed to convince herself that the press was dead set against her and her Russia-connection conspiracy, even though only two of the fifty-nine largest newspapers in the country had failed to endorse her. Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald were among the few liberal skeptics of the fantastic story.
In any event, by September 2016 The New York Times conceded that the consensus among government intelligence agencies was that WikiLeaks had no ties to Russian intelligence.
Two years and dozens of breathless claims later we still have zero evidence for the alleged Trump-Russia collusion. The FBI never investigated for the simple reason that the DNC wouldn't allow the Bureau to examine its computers. As Glenn Greenwald noted in The Intercept, "there is no evidence . . . just CIA assertions over and over . . . "
Initial media response found the claim of a Russian conspiracy "remarkable," and this held true until Hillary lost the election. Then it suddenly became a news story worthy of Watergate, replete with Congressional investigations, saturation media coverage, and an "independent" counsel. Obama reacted by meekly telling Putin to "cut it out," but he imposed no sanctions, issued no major rebuke, and refrained from retaliation. This for something Thomas Friedman compared to Pearl Harbor and 911. In other words, after mild initial reaction, two years of intensive searching by the nation's top investigative journalists and up to 100 FBI agents has yielded nothing like collusion.
What has passed for evidence in the case is a dossier authored by Christopher Steele, a British spy who offered Hillary Clinton and the Democratic national Committee dirt on Trump from the Russians. Did Hillary recoil in shocked outrage at this treasonous plot? Of course not. She paid Steele for the information. Yes, that's right. Hillary Clinton colluded with the Russians to discredit Trump, but Robert Mueller isn't interested in that collusion. He's looking for collusion between Russia and the victim of the plot.
Explains Coulter: "Hillary's campaign and the DNC hired Steele, using a Seattle law firm as a cutout. The law firm hired Fusion GPS, which in turn hired the British spy, who paid current and former Russian government officials for incriminating information on Trump."
Steele revealed his motive to Department of Justice official Bruce Ohr, saying he was "desperate that Trump not get elected and was passionate about him not being president." OK, but motives aside, did he come up with anything? Not if you believe the New York Times, which says that the information in the Steele dossier "was not corroborated, and the New York Times has not been able to confirm the claims." And remember that The New York Times, like the press in general, loathes Trump, and would gladly have reported substantiation of the claims in the Steele dossier had they found any.
In fact, so eager was The Times to discredit Trump that it flat-out stated that his firing of F.B.I. director James Comey had "echoes of Watergate,"when in fact it did not. For Comey himself admitted under oath to Senator James Risch (R-Ohio) that the FBI hadn't been investigating Trump at the time he was fired, so Trump couldn't have been "obstructing justice" in an ongoing case against him. In point of fact, Trump fired Comey precisely because he wouldn't stop publicly insinuating that Trump was under investigation when in fact he wasn't. Meanwhile, journalists simply assumed that Trump was guilty of colluding with Russia, and that firing Comey was a transparent attempt to cover up criminal activity.
In short, the mountain keeps laboring, but brings forth but a mouse. The charges to date are a complete farce. Here's a partial list:
National Security Adviser Michael Flynn: He talked to Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak during the transition period between the Obama and Trump administrations, and then didn't disclose it on security clearance paperwork, which is not customary because such meetings are routine.
Paul Manafort - Briefly Trump's "campaign" chairman, he was originally accused of violating the same (unenforced) lobbying registration law that ensnared Michael Flynn, but has since been charged with setting up offshore accounts to avoid taxes, which could make him guilty of practicing capitalism. In October 2017, journalist Ken Silverstein wrote that "I can say with certainty that the law, which Manafort is accused of violating, known as the Foreign Agents Registration Act, or FARA, is a complete joke." The article in which this comment appeared was entitled, "I've Covered Foreign Lobbying for 20 Years and I'm Amazed Manafort Got Busted." In any event, Manafort's guilt or innocence hasn't been demonstrated to have anything to do with Trump.
Carter Page - a non-entity whose name Trump appears to have lifted out of a hat when confronted by media claims that he didn't have any establishment certified national security advisers on his team. Page was subsequently slapped with a FISA warrant, which proves he is appallingly guilty of something. For as Ronald Reagan's former Attorney General Ed Meese memorably informed us, "If a person is innocent of a crime, then he is not a suspect." What could be clearer?
Attorney General Jeff Sessions: He also met with Russian ambassador Kislyak, when he was a senator, and then didn't record the dastardly deed on security clearance forms, which the FBI doesn't want because such meetings are routine.
But wait! Didn't former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen pay Stormy Daniels to keep quiet about her affair with Trump? That's a violation of campaign finance laws! Possibly, but such violations are a dime a dozen, and if we run every politician who has paid off a mistress out of office Washington will be a ghost town.
There is much, much more in Coulter's book, but check it out of the library rather than buy it, since Coulter herself is equally prone to slipping into political hysteria when the topic is Communism or Islam. She insists, for example, that Martin Luther King was under the control of Moscow when he made his (accurate) claim that the "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world [is] my own government." And, of course, many of us remember her advice for dealing with the Islamic world following the 911 attacks, when she said, quite subtly, that "we should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity."
American politics is a tale of two hysterias. Rationality has been driven from the stage.
Psychologists have been treating "Trump anxiety" for some time now, and judging by the reaction of liberals to Coulter, they may soon have to treat Trump Tantrum Disorder as well. As Coulter points out, liberals have grown furiously unhinged by isolating themselves in self-righteous bubbles of Trump haters that exchange indignant comments about his latest outrages, most of which are simply imaginary.
For example, whenever the specter of American fascism is raised (every five minutes) we are told that Trump is a virtual Hitler clone. Uh, right. We all remember from our history books how Hitler went around boasting of his opportunities to grab women by the pussy, promising to replace the Treaty of Versailles with "something terrific," and engaging in fawning adulation of anyone he hoped to get something from. As Coulter puts it, "I don't remember Hitler or Stalin going around saying, 'These people are great. Incredible, outstanding, quality people.' And who in the WWII era would have described Hitler as Coulter describes Trump: '[He's] utterly undisciplined, runs his mouth, flatters everyone, and agrees with the last person he spoke to. Why, it's right out of the Mein Kampf playbook!"
The rage against Trump is proof that the election of 2016 never really ended. In her first post-election interview Hillary Clinton declared herself "part of the resistance," rather than the customary "loyal opposition." If Trump had lost and declared himself part of the anti-Clinton "resistance", Coulter notes, there would have been demands to put him in jail. "He's issuing a call to violence! 'Resistance' is a military term! It's a 'dog whistle' to the militias and the KKK!" Touché.
This attitude is simply a continuation of liberal hysteria during the campaign. Remember the Access Hollywood tape, somehow not a sleazy "October surprise" by the partisan media, which made no secret of its loathing of Trump? In spite of what was repeatedly claimed, there was no endorsement of sexual assault on the tape. Unless you are using a weapon, "they let you do it" means consent. Trump was simply uttering truisms about celebrity culture, not glorifying rape. Notes Coulter: "His whole point was to cite something axiomatically unacceptable - grabbing women by the P-word - in order to say that celebrity culture was so out of whack that a celebrity could get away with it." One could quibble with the "out of whack" part of the comment, as on the tape it appears that Trump in fact found this benefit of fame both natural and desirable. What needed to be explained was not this reaction of a life-long egomaniac, but the shocked indignation of the corporate media: after all, who knew that billionaires and other mega-stars enjoy sex on demand from beautiful women? Right, everyone. And as Coulter points out, Trump used the identical approach in saying his popularity was so great that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue without losing voter support. "That's not a confession, notes Coulter, "it's hyperbole." Nevertheless, she goes on, "Nexis can't perform a search for all the publications that have accused Trump of admitting to 'sexual assault,' because it retrieves too many documents." Long live fake news.
And while we're on the subject of fake news, how long has it been since Trump was last accused of being a racist? Five minutes? Surely we can do better than that. Don't let up for a minute on claims that he's giving aid and comfort to "white nationalists" and therefore obligated to condemn David Duke every three minutes and defend himself against the Southern Poverty Law Center, which has warned of an imminent neo-Nazi-KKK take-over of the U.S. on a more or less constant basis for nearly four decades.
The Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville a year ago has been regarded as the definitive proof of Trump's racism, though a New York Times reporter tweeted direct from the melee that left-wing Antifa protestors were just as aggressively violent as the racist right. Nevertheless, Trump's observation that there was violence (and "good people") "on both sides" has been used as confirmation of his alleged white supremacist sensibilities. By now, official memory has it that Antifa violence wasn't violence, and only "Nazis" were guilty of such. In one of her book's best lines, Coulter notes, "The more the rally recedes in time, the fresher a memory it becomes," which is an excellent description of all kinds of propaganda induced "memory." With all due regret for the death of Heather Heyer, we still don't know anything about the state of mind of the man who ran over her, who may have been in fear for his life, and few "journalists" are even curious about the matter.
But on to the alleged Trump-Russia collusion in the 2016 elections that is the main focus of Coulter's book. The basic allegation is that Trump, according to liberals a boundlessly incompetent buffoon, somehow managed to engage in a byzantine international conspiracy with Russian intelligence to steal the 2016 presidential election from Hillary Clinton. The original claim was that Russia hacked the e-mails of the DNC (after allegedly being invited to do so by Trump in a presidential debate with Clinton) and Hillary's aide John Podesta, then gave them to WikiLeaks, and that this somehow predictably benefited Trump. But why the Russians would have hacked the DNC to retrieve "lost" e-mails that were no longer on their server is difficult to explain. Furthermore, how could the Russians have had any assurance that the Podesta e-mails would end up helping Trump? That leak mostly hurt the DNC chairperson Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who was forced to resign.
More to the point, the Russian election meddling theme is simply a joke. The U.S. meddles in elections all the time, and when that fails, overthrows unwanted governments by force, often assassinating their democratic leaders as well. At William Blum's excellent archive at www.killinghope.org, you can read until your eyes bleed about the C.I.A. undermining democratic elections around the world going back seventy years. In recent years George Soros alone has repeatedly manipulated election outcomes in Georgia, the Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan, variously called the Orange revolution, the Tulip revolution, and the Rose revolution. And while we like to wax self-righteous about Russia interfering in our elections, we tend to forget that Boris Yeltsin would not likely have become president of Russia without a major intervention by the U.S. But perhaps the most ludicrous notion of all is that a relative handful of Russian bots posting on Facebook handed the election to Trump, which is like saying that a coke poured in the water supply prevented us from curing our diabetes epidemic.
The origin of the story alone should make us extremely skeptical about any Trump-Russia collusion, even apart from the absurd pretense that the U.S. has the moral standing to accuse others of such anti-democratic practices. Hillary Clinton invented the Russian collusion story in the summer of 2016 because she needed to neutralize the DNC's e-mails having shown up on WikiLeaks. This was a classic Clinton maneuver: whenever she is caught in a scandal she diverts attention to all-pervading imaginary enemies - misogynists, unscrupulous political opponents, racists, a vast right-wing conspiracy, and now, Russia and Donald Trump.
So Clinton campaign chairman Robby Mook went on ABC's This Week with George Stephanopoulos to tell the world about the Russian conspiracy on July 24, 2016, the eve of the Democratic National Convention. "Experts are telling us that Russian state actors broke into the DNC, took all these emails and now are leaking them out through these Web sites . . .. And it's troubling that some experts are now telling us that this was done by - by the Russians for the purpose of helping Donald Trump." The anonymous reference to "some experts" has not been cleared up to this day.
Of course, Hillary Clinton would have preferred to spin a web of conspiracy around Trump and ISIS or Trump and North Korea, but Trump didn't have business interests with either of them, so she revved up a new Cold War instead. She somehow managed to convince herself that the press was dead set against her and her Russia-connection conspiracy, even though only two of the fifty-nine largest newspapers in the country had failed to endorse her. Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald were among the few liberal skeptics of the fantastic story.
In any event, by September 2016 The New York Times conceded that the consensus among government intelligence agencies was that WikiLeaks had no ties to Russian intelligence.
Two years and dozens of breathless claims later we still have zero evidence for the alleged Trump-Russia collusion. The FBI never investigated for the simple reason that the DNC wouldn't allow the Bureau to examine its computers. As Glenn Greenwald noted in The Intercept, "there is no evidence . . . just CIA assertions over and over . . . "
Initial media response found the claim of a Russian conspiracy "remarkable," and this held true until Hillary lost the election. Then it suddenly became a news story worthy of Watergate, replete with Congressional investigations, saturation media coverage, and an "independent" counsel. Obama reacted by meekly telling Putin to "cut it out," but he imposed no sanctions, issued no major rebuke, and refrained from retaliation. This for something Thomas Friedman compared to Pearl Harbor and 911. In other words, after mild initial reaction, two years of intensive searching by the nation's top investigative journalists and up to 100 FBI agents has yielded nothing like collusion.
What has passed for evidence in the case is a dossier authored by Christopher Steele, a British spy who offered Hillary Clinton and the Democratic national Committee dirt on Trump from the Russians. Did Hillary recoil in shocked outrage at this treasonous plot? Of course not. She paid Steele for the information. Yes, that's right. Hillary Clinton colluded with the Russians to discredit Trump, but Robert Mueller isn't interested in that collusion. He's looking for collusion between Russia and the victim of the plot.
Explains Coulter: "Hillary's campaign and the DNC hired Steele, using a Seattle law firm as a cutout. The law firm hired Fusion GPS, which in turn hired the British spy, who paid current and former Russian government officials for incriminating information on Trump."
Steele revealed his motive to Department of Justice official Bruce Ohr, saying he was "desperate that Trump not get elected and was passionate about him not being president." OK, but motives aside, did he come up with anything? Not if you believe the New York Times, which says that the information in the Steele dossier "was not corroborated, and the New York Times has not been able to confirm the claims." And remember that The New York Times, like the press in general, loathes Trump, and would gladly have reported substantiation of the claims in the Steele dossier had they found any.
In fact, so eager was The Times to discredit Trump that it flat-out stated that his firing of F.B.I. director James Comey had "echoes of Watergate,"when in fact it did not. For Comey himself admitted under oath to Senator James Risch (R-Ohio) that the FBI hadn't been investigating Trump at the time he was fired, so Trump couldn't have been "obstructing justice" in an ongoing case against him. In point of fact, Trump fired Comey precisely because he wouldn't stop publicly insinuating that Trump was under investigation when in fact he wasn't. Meanwhile, journalists simply assumed that Trump was guilty of colluding with Russia, and that firing Comey was a transparent attempt to cover up criminal activity.
In short, the mountain keeps laboring, but brings forth but a mouse. The charges to date are a complete farce. Here's a partial list:
National Security Adviser Michael Flynn: He talked to Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak during the transition period between the Obama and Trump administrations, and then didn't disclose it on security clearance paperwork, which is not customary because such meetings are routine.
Paul Manafort - Briefly Trump's "campaign" chairman, he was originally accused of violating the same (unenforced) lobbying registration law that ensnared Michael Flynn, but has since been charged with setting up offshore accounts to avoid taxes, which could make him guilty of practicing capitalism. In October 2017, journalist Ken Silverstein wrote that "I can say with certainty that the law, which Manafort is accused of violating, known as the Foreign Agents Registration Act, or FARA, is a complete joke." The article in which this comment appeared was entitled, "I've Covered Foreign Lobbying for 20 Years and I'm Amazed Manafort Got Busted." In any event, Manafort's guilt or innocence hasn't been demonstrated to have anything to do with Trump.
Carter Page - a non-entity whose name Trump appears to have lifted out of a hat when confronted by media claims that he didn't have any establishment certified national security advisers on his team. Page was subsequently slapped with a FISA warrant, which proves he is appallingly guilty of something. For as Ronald Reagan's former Attorney General Ed Meese memorably informed us, "If a person is innocent of a crime, then he is not a suspect." What could be clearer?
Attorney General Jeff Sessions: He also met with Russian ambassador Kislyak, when he was a senator, and then didn't record the dastardly deed on security clearance forms, which the FBI doesn't want because such meetings are routine.
But wait! Didn't former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen pay Stormy Daniels to keep quiet about her affair with Trump? That's a violation of campaign finance laws! Possibly, but such violations are a dime a dozen, and if we run every politician who has paid off a mistress out of office Washington will be a ghost town.
There is much, much more in Coulter's book, but check it out of the library rather than buy it, since Coulter herself is equally prone to slipping into political hysteria when the topic is Communism or Islam. She insists, for example, that Martin Luther King was under the control of Moscow when he made his (accurate) claim that the "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world [is] my own government." And, of course, many of us remember her advice for dealing with the Islamic world following the 911 attacks, when she said, quite subtly, that "we should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity."
American politics is a tale of two hysterias. Rationality has been driven from the stage.
Wednesday, September 5, 2018
Thought Control Back in the USA: Far More Effective than Communist Censorship
"You can think about censorship as a pyramid. This pyramid only has its tip sticking out of the sand, and that is by intention. The tip is public - libel suits, murders of journalists, cameras being snatched by the military, and so on - publicly declared censorship. But that is the smallest component. Under the tip, the next layer is all those people who don't want to be at the tip, who engage in self-censorship to not end up there. Then the next layer is all the forms of economic inducement or patronage inducement that are given to people to write about one thing or another. The next layer down is raw economy - what it is economic to write about, even if you don't include the economic factors from higher up the pyramid. Then the next layer is the prejudice of readers who only have a certain level of education, so therefore on one hand they are easy to manipulate with false information, and on the other hand you can't even tell them something sophisticated that is true. The last layer is distribution - for example, some people just don't have access to information in a particular language. So that is the censorship pyramid. . . .
"Now such censorship is deniable because it either takes place out of the light, or because there is no instruction to censor a particular claim. Journalists are rarely instructed, 'Don't print anything about that,' or, 'Don't print that fact.' Rather they understand that they are expected to because they understand the interest of those they wish to placate or grow close to. If you behave you'll be patted on the head and rewarded, and if you don't behave then you won't. It's that simple. I'm often fond of making this example: the obvious censorship that occurred in the Soviet Union, the censorship that was propagandized about so much in the West - jackboots coming for journalists in the middle of the night to take them from their homes - has just been shifted by twelve hours. Now we wait for the day and take homes from journalists, as they fall out of patronage and are unable to service their debts. Journalists are taken from their homes by taking homes from the journalists. Western societies specialize in laundering censorship and structuring the affairs of the powerful such that any remaining public speech that gets through has a hard time affecting the true power relationships of a highly fiscalized society, because such relationships are hidden in layers of complexity and secrecy."
-----Julian Assange, Cypherpunks - Freedom and the Future of the Internet
" . . . in nations that our textbooks call totalitarian, strict controls obtain concerning press, T.V., public debate. These societies are like bad gardeners who spend whole days out in the sun pruning bushes, doing their best to cut down hopeless growths of undesired ideologies, because they do not yet have skillful means for poisoning the soil. Because they are old-fashioned, and are forced to strike with crude utensils at the full-grown foliage they did not know enough to poison in its bed, we are entitled to decree that they are brutal and undemocratic. By implication, we discern ourselves to be more civilized. The truth is that we simply know a better way to tend the garden.
"Professors at our universities, with rare exceptions, are granted the theoretical right to advocate rebellion, to develop and reflect on Marxist ideologies, to argue for an end to private ownership of land, homes, factories and means of transportation. In the same sense, editors at Newsweek or The New York Times are free to view the Cuban Revolution as a positive step forward for humanity. It is a clever North American deception to allow professor, scholar, editor alike, to say what they please when we know well that what they please is what we like. When wishes, ideas and dreams themselves can be confined like this, words can be free. The bulls, once surgically restrained, receive all barnyard privileges."
-----Jonathan Kozol, The Night Is Dark and I Am Far from Home
"Now such censorship is deniable because it either takes place out of the light, or because there is no instruction to censor a particular claim. Journalists are rarely instructed, 'Don't print anything about that,' or, 'Don't print that fact.' Rather they understand that they are expected to because they understand the interest of those they wish to placate or grow close to. If you behave you'll be patted on the head and rewarded, and if you don't behave then you won't. It's that simple. I'm often fond of making this example: the obvious censorship that occurred in the Soviet Union, the censorship that was propagandized about so much in the West - jackboots coming for journalists in the middle of the night to take them from their homes - has just been shifted by twelve hours. Now we wait for the day and take homes from journalists, as they fall out of patronage and are unable to service their debts. Journalists are taken from their homes by taking homes from the journalists. Western societies specialize in laundering censorship and structuring the affairs of the powerful such that any remaining public speech that gets through has a hard time affecting the true power relationships of a highly fiscalized society, because such relationships are hidden in layers of complexity and secrecy."
-----Julian Assange, Cypherpunks - Freedom and the Future of the Internet
" . . . in nations that our textbooks call totalitarian, strict controls obtain concerning press, T.V., public debate. These societies are like bad gardeners who spend whole days out in the sun pruning bushes, doing their best to cut down hopeless growths of undesired ideologies, because they do not yet have skillful means for poisoning the soil. Because they are old-fashioned, and are forced to strike with crude utensils at the full-grown foliage they did not know enough to poison in its bed, we are entitled to decree that they are brutal and undemocratic. By implication, we discern ourselves to be more civilized. The truth is that we simply know a better way to tend the garden.
"Professors at our universities, with rare exceptions, are granted the theoretical right to advocate rebellion, to develop and reflect on Marxist ideologies, to argue for an end to private ownership of land, homes, factories and means of transportation. In the same sense, editors at Newsweek or The New York Times are free to view the Cuban Revolution as a positive step forward for humanity. It is a clever North American deception to allow professor, scholar, editor alike, to say what they please when we know well that what they please is what we like. When wishes, ideas and dreams themselves can be confined like this, words can be free. The bulls, once surgically restrained, receive all barnyard privileges."
-----Jonathan Kozol, The Night Is Dark and I Am Far from Home
Friday, August 31, 2018
U.S. Intelligence Agencies Call For Impeachment of Trump!
Key Judgments
"We assess that president-elect Donald J. Trump has said degrading things about women in the past. All three agencies agree with this judgment. CIA and FBI have high confidence in this judgment; NSA has moderate confidence.
"We assess that President-elect Trump's goals were to undermine young girls' self-esteem and to silence women's voices. All three agencies agree with this judgment. CIA and FBI have high confidence in this judgment; NSA has moderate confidence.
"President-elect Trump's approach evolved over the course of the campaign. When it appeared to Trump that Secretary Clinton was likely to win the nomination, the campaign began to focus more on lifting up his racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic supporters. All three agencies agree with this judgment. CIA and FBI have high confidence with this judgment; NSA has moderate confidence.
"We further assess president-elect Trump will continue to develop capabilities to fat-shame women in the United States, judging from past practice and current efforts. All three agencies agree with this judgment. CIA and FBI have high confidence in this judgment; NSA has moderate confidence.
"Trust us. Trump is a dickweed."
-----Ann Coulter, Resistance Is Futile! - How The Trump-Hating Left Lost Its Collective Mind
"We assess that president-elect Donald J. Trump has said degrading things about women in the past. All three agencies agree with this judgment. CIA and FBI have high confidence in this judgment; NSA has moderate confidence.
"We assess that President-elect Trump's goals were to undermine young girls' self-esteem and to silence women's voices. All three agencies agree with this judgment. CIA and FBI have high confidence in this judgment; NSA has moderate confidence.
"President-elect Trump's approach evolved over the course of the campaign. When it appeared to Trump that Secretary Clinton was likely to win the nomination, the campaign began to focus more on lifting up his racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic supporters. All three agencies agree with this judgment. CIA and FBI have high confidence with this judgment; NSA has moderate confidence.
"We further assess president-elect Trump will continue to develop capabilities to fat-shame women in the United States, judging from past practice and current efforts. All three agencies agree with this judgment. CIA and FBI have high confidence in this judgment; NSA has moderate confidence.
"Trust us. Trump is a dickweed."
-----Ann Coulter, Resistance Is Futile! - How The Trump-Hating Left Lost Its Collective Mind
Wednesday, August 29, 2018
The Free Press, The Free Market and The Tooth Fairy
“Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.” A.J. Liebling
As major capitalist media claim threats to a free press tradition in America, thescreams for mercy emanating from establishment sources have been accompanied by yelping from some alleged alternative voices from what often amounts to the anti-social online world. At the behest of minority owners of our democracy, proponents of this alleged freedom at the NewYorkTimes, WashingtonPost and their TV counterparts, along with please-go-fund-me- patriots from the revolutionary professional class have been working to impeach Trump since before he took office, with frenzied calling for the scalp which barely covers his nearly-empty-as-their-heads, and daily revelations of newer and juicier gossip crimes to assure freedom by throwing him out and setting president Pence up in the subsidized housing in Washington DC. What?
Among the increasingly demented folk running the country for their ruling employers, this would represent freedom worshipping, democratic national action. Yes, if you read, watch and listen to what passes for the information flow from the polluted stream pouring out of America’s national information toilet. And you can’t just flush the stuff away; almost instantly, it comes out of showers and kitchen faucets, with bulletins about Trump’s treason, sexism, racism, and just about any and every only recently discovered truth about our system being flung at this soon-to-be-revealed-a-capitalist (Oh! My! God! Who! Could! Have! Known?)
with an insect brain powering an elephant ego.
Well paid professional voices hired by our incredibly wealthy ruling aristocracy are joined by online media slum dwellers passing for an American left in crying for mercy from the alleged fascist Trump, who would have trouble fathoming the intellect of Mussolini let alone meet any other definition of fascism from material reality and not a Spielberg movie or Marvel comic. And when it comes to discussion of that wealth, its impact on our people, our nation and the world, you’d better check foreign information sources because the few that cover such things in America are confined to a news and commentary ghetto that makes the disgraceful homeless tent camps of America seem like gentrified property.
The people of our fictional democracy dependent on misinformation, booze and drugs to maintain tolerance for its disintegration at their loss and for the profits of a dwindling few might not take kindly being told the following, in the kind of headlines we read about Trumps scandals:
That we are collectively in debt for trillions of dollars which we borrowed from a relative handful of people who are actually loaning us our money which we print and then put in their banks so that they, in their passionate democratic love for usury, could extend it to us in loans charging us far more interest than what they pay us to allegedly save and which we will never be able to repay in this or any other lifetime.
The former allegedly free market which produced food clothing and shelter for all who could afford it and told the rest to drop dead has transformed into an allegedly free market which produces debt and credit with which to purchase food clothing and shelter and this has led to quite a few doing better than ever and a greater than ever crowd being told to drop dead.
And without floating on an ocean of debt which could become a desert at any moment, many in the servant-to-the-rich crowd doing quite well could wind up sleeping in their cars or under a bridge at the next upheaval in the market based on prayer, drugs and hallucination in defiance of the substance some still call material reality.
When global capital’s high priests and rabbis at their Vatican/Jerusalem, the International Monetary Fund, make uncomfortable statements about how the system may not be able to tolerate much more debt as it reached 164 trillion this March (but is over 200 trillion now, in august, according to the Institute for International Finance) we might be confused at the numbers but understand they are fantastic compared to what ordinary humans can fathom. Even millions of dollars can sound fictional to many of us, while billions are truly science fiction. But trillions? Hello?
The IMF debt figure represents 225% of global GDP. That means our debt is two and a quarter times more than what we produce. Even given that almost all of us are and have been in debt most of our lives, the fact is that all of us are in greater debt than we have ever been before, have less to show for it, and pay a far heavier price on it than we ever did in the past. Further, most of us would be in the market religion’s “drop dead” category the moment we could no longer borrow more money to pay part of our past debt and be assured of borrowing more in future to pay an even higher figure than we now owe. Huh?
We carry more than 830 billion dollars in credit card debt as a nation and among our most comfortable people are those of us dining on steak and salmon with an actual rice and beans budget but able to use our plastic to pay 170 dollars even if we only have 17 in cash. But going from gourmet foods to burgers and fries may lower quality but does sustain life. What happens to the larger number among us who are already dining on rice, beans, burgers and pizza, who have our plastic debt become so large we can’t “charge” things anymore? Our upper middle class will suffer, for sure, but our majority will suffer even more if-when the balloon bursts or the shit hits the fan, depending on vernacular used which also depends on how much debt we are carrying. But when you can’t meet the bill and your credit has run out, you might as well put your bedclothes in your car, if you have one, or borrow a tent and sleeping bag. The last estimate of our homeless population was more than half a million, a truly disgraceful figure among a population owing trillions in debt for war and pet care while reducing millions of its citizens to poverty and more than half a million to living in the street.
Do we need public banks, employee owned and democratically operated businesses, a dollar free electoral system and conversation with our fellow humans as opposed to mass murdering them every time there is an alleged disagreement among our rulers and thus our responsibility to kill and die for them? Does a snake have wings?
Obviously, we owe far too much and get far too little for it and the only way to end that system is to transform it to one that puts us, collectively, before only some of us, individually. Which means we not only need to pay attention to what the government of a minority of the people is doing to us but change it to a government of the majority, which it has never been in our history, was never designed to be in its origins, but needs to become if any of us are to have a future as a race, the only human one to have ever existed even if seemingly more divided than ever at the moment. And that’s only according to the minority rich. But the majority needs to move with all deliberate speed to transform a system and not just its figureheads. Voting for any more of them amounts to something far worse than putting teeth under a pillow in hopes of finding food, clothing and shelter when you wake.
Thursday, August 9, 2018
What About The Trans Species Minority?
With all the current attention given to people who are born one sex but feel, think, act and wish to be known as another, an even smaller group of people have been forgotten. If they were ever known of in the first place.
The subject of Trans-Species people was brought to the attention of Middle America when a man who identifies as a raccoon and belongs to a group trying to get recognition from society complained about being denied the food service he needs at mid-western chic-a-taco-pizza-burger-chip-crab-fries facilities.
“I need to burrow for grubs as often as I eat regular food and these places provide no opportunity for people like me to follow my natural bodily instincts to answer my trans species needs” said a man who refused to give his name but claimed he and others in his group choose to be addressed as “coons”. When advised that could be called hate speech since it was once used as a derogatory term for people with more color than people with no color, he said “Things change and america and the world needs to be open to realize that there are many among us, not just us coons but folks like trans male donkeys who call themselves "assholes", trans female cats who like to be called "pussies" and trans female dogs who answer to "bitches" and many others among our community who have needs and desires and the right to be acknowledged and addressed by the names we choose.”
The anonymous man said he always knew he was different as a child, at first thinking he was a dog until his family bought a cat but even then he was not sure. “When I saw a raccoon in our garden and looked into its eyes I felt a bond and an understanding that has taken me on a path to find my true self in spending time in trees, raiding garbage cans and especially burrowing into the earth in search of delicious grubs. This is who I am and what I am and no psychiatrist, neurosurgeon, bank teller or UPS driver can change that.”
Officials at the anonymous town in the anonymous state were trying to measure popular consciousness, social morality, public need and market forces in coming to a decision in how to deal with these transpecies people either by catering to their needs or, as in the case of most powerless minorities without dollars , celebrity clout or emotionally appealing personal dramas, just telling them to drop fucking dead.
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