Monthly Archives: August 2018

Colloquialisms and Racism

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Ron DeSantis, Republican candidate for Governor of Florida, suggested in an interview shortly after his nomination, that his just-nominated Progressive-Democrat opponent, Tallahassee Mayor Andrew Gillum, would, if elected, monkey up the Florida economy.

Oh, the hue and cry from the Progressive-Democrats, the NLMSM, and from Gillum.  A colloquialism that plainly means to mess with things, or to mess things up, suddenly is a racist bull horn—much more than a dog whistle according to Gillum.

How can this be?  One candidate says another candidate will mess things up, and this is racist!?

Oh, wait—Gillum is black.

Notice that.  Gillum isn’t a political candidate who happens to be a black man; he’s a black man who happens to be a political candidate.

Americans for generations have worked hard to make race irrelevant.  All men are created equal, equal employment, Martin Luther King’s dream, and on and on.

But not anymore.  The Progressive-Democrat, his Party, and the Left in general insist that what’s important here is the man’s race, not his policies.  It’s his race that gives meaning to the colloquialism, not his policies.

This emphasis by the Progressive-Democrat, his Party, and the Left in general on race is rank racist bigotry.  That it’s wholly artificial, done by politicians solely for personal political gain and by pseudo-journalists solely for click bait makes their racism even worse.

Gillum’s cynically artificial racism should disqualify him from public office.

Trust and the FBI

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Thomas Baker, a retired FBI agent, had some thoughts in the The Wall Street Journal about how to restore trust in the FBI. Naturally, I have some thoughts on those thoughts.

The centralization of case management at FBI headquarters. According to Florida Rep Matt Gaetz [R], an email from Mr McCabe said that Hillary Clinton would receive an “HQ special”—lenient treatment in the investigation into her handling of classified materials. Mr Wray has tasked Associate Deputy Director Paul Abbate to review how the bureau manages sensitive investigations.

That’s the wrong step. Director Wray needs first to explain why some investigations are more sensitive than others and then to eliminate that dichotomy.  All investigations are sensitive.  Or does Wray think some Americans are more equal than others?

Bad relations with Congress. The FBI needs to re-establish a climate of mutual respect with lawmakers. The “Gang of Eight”—congressional leaders and intelligence committee chiefs—is the time-tested vehicle for sharing sensitive information. The bureau should use it.

The only way the Bureau can be trusted to use it is with a 100% turnover of current FBI management.  And with a law requiring the FBI to turn over all materials subpoenaed—without redaction—within [24 hours] of the subpoena being issued.

A dysfunctional Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act process. House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes has said Congress will look at this after the midterm elections. But the FBI and Justice Department need not wait. They should adopt an internal standard to avoid the use of FISA to target an American citizen….

No.  Star Chambers, secretive or otherwise, have no place in a free republic. The FISA courts need to be done away with.  That should be the direction of Nunes’ “look at.”

A lack of emphasis on the Constitution. FBI special agents always have been instructed about the Constitution. But a new category of employee arose after 9/11. Intelligence analysts, who don’t directly interact with citizens in ways that touch on the Constitution’s guarantees, now play a major role in the bureau’s mission.  …  It is imperative that they, too, receive training about the Constitution.

No.  The FBI is a domestic police force, it is not a domestic spy agency.  Intelligence is the purview of the CIA, which already is enjoined (badly; enforcement needs to be stepped up) from domestic spying.  Leave the policing to the police and the spying to the spies.  Where there’s overlap, Congress and the public courts can work the question, Congress in the more general case and the courts on individual cases.

None of this will work though, without a wholesale replacement of FBI management from the middle layers all the way up.  Middle management on up and not just the leadership alluded to above because the cultural failure caused by the FBI’s politically appointed management has gone on for so long that it reaches that deep.  The fastest way to restore the FBI’s culture is to get rid of the current, dysfunctional culture’s practitioners and outright adherents.

It’s true enough that this will entail removal of some good people along with those who’ve failed their duty.  However, the failures within the Bureau are so rampant, wide, and deep that a scalpel cannot meet the task. The situation wants an axe.

Democracy

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The Progressive-Democratic Party and the Left in general no longer believe in democracy, whether republican or popular.  Here’s Robert Reich, Labor Secretary in the Clinton administration:

The title of his piece is the gist of the position: Don’t Impeach Trump, Annul His Presidency.  Read past the irrational hysteria in his first several paragraphs, hysteria like this:

Even if he loses in 2020, we’ll be fortunate if he concedes without being literally carried out of the Oval Office amid the stirrings of civil insurgency.
Oh, and let me remind you that even if he’s impeached, we’d still have his loathsome administration—Pence on down.

and you get to the meat of his—and their—demand.

Suppose, just suppose, Robert Mueller finds overwhelming and indisputable evidence that Trump conspired with Putin to rig the 2016 election, and the rigging determined the election’s outcome.
In other words, Trump’s presidency is not authorized under the United States Constitution.
…
What then? Impeachment isn’t enough.

He went on:

Impeachment would remedy Trump’s “high crimes and misdemeanors.” But impeachment would not remedy Trump’s unconstitutional presidency because it would leave in place his vice president, White House staff and Cabinet, as well as all the executive orders he issued and all the legislation he signed, and the official record of his presidency.
The only response to an unconstitutional presidency is to annul it. Annulment would repeal all of an unconstitutional president’s appointments and executive actions, and would eliminate the official record of the presidency.
Annulment would recognize that all such appointments, actions, and records were made without constitutional authority.
The Constitution does not specifically provide for annulment of an unconstitutional presidency. But read as a whole, the Constitution leads to the logical conclusion that annulment is the appropriate remedy for one.
After all, the Supreme Court declares legislation that doesn’t comport with the Constitution null and void, as if it had never been passed.
It would logically follow that the Court could declare all legislation and executive actions of a presidency unauthorized by the Constitution to be null and void, as if Trump had never been elected.
The Constitution also gives Congress and the states the power to amend the Constitution, thereby annulling or altering whatever provisions came before. Here, too, it would logically follow that Congress and the states could, through amendment, annul a presidency they determine to be unconstitutional.
…
[The Trump Presidency] should be annulled.

Here are the Party and the Left—anyone from either of the two heavily overlapping groups—decrying their man’s demands.  By their studied silence are they known to agree.  That Reich’s piece is so irrational does not bother them in the least.  Nor does his desire to completely rewrite history to a depth and breadth that would shame the leadership of the erstwhile Soviet Union and the ongoing People’s Republic of China.

That irrationality, however, is a threat to our great republican democracy.  Remember this in the fall.

A “secretive, corrupt and troubling process”

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In a Letter to the Editor in Monday’s Wall Street Journal, Kristine Lucius, of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, decried the allegedly secretive, corrupt, and troubling process (Lucius’ phrase) with which the document release related to Judge Brett Kavanaugh is being handled by the Senate Judiciary Committee.  She even went so far as to compare the document release of then-nominee Elena Kagan with that of Kavanaugh:

When President Obama nominated Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court, then-Chairman Patrick Leahy joined with then-Ranking Member Jeff Sessions to request and receive access to her records from the Clinton White House—a full 99% of them. But now that the shoe is on the other foot, Chairman Chuck Grassley refuses to even request the same set of records for Mr Kavanaugh from the National Archives.

Couple things about that.

That Ms Lucius succeeded in getting potsful of irrelevant documentation released for committee consideration in no way legitimizes wasting committee time on similarly irrelevant documents regarding Kavanaugh’s nomination.

Besides, the secretive, corrupt, and troubling process with the Kavanaugh nomination is solely that of the Progressive-Democrat Senators. They’re the ones who said they’d vote “No” on the Trump nomination for Kennedy’s replacement even before a nominee was named. They’re the ones who said, even louder, they’d vote “NO” on Kavanaugh’s nomination the day it was announced—before any document requests were even made.

It’s the Progressive-Democrat Senators who are being secretive and troubling by keeping million pages of documentation and 300 judicial opinions away from their own eyes, having already announced their votes, and thereby making their own process corrupt.

Of course, Lucious knows all of that.

“I followed my heart”

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Ohio State University has suspended its head football coach and its Athletic Director after an internal investigation substantiated their failure to properly handle a football staffer’s domestic abuse allegation.

Now-former Wide Receivers Coach Zach Smith was accused of abusing his wife three years, they divorced two years ago, and Smith was fired earlier this year after an Ohio court granted Smith’s wife a domestic violence protective order.

Urban Meyer, the suspended (but not yet disgraced—OSU still has him on their payroll and in his head coaching role—head football coach said he tried to keep Smith on staff

out of loyalty to former Buckeye coach Earle Bruce, Smith’s grandfather and a man Meyer described as “a mentor and like a father to me.”

Meyer also said of the failure

I followed my heart, not my head.

What kind of heart uses loyalty to an abuser’s grandfather as an excuse for not acting on the abuser’s abuse?