A Book Review . . . The Full Extent Of Democrats’ Nefariousness
By JAMES BARESEL
Ball of Collusion: The Plot to Rig and Election and Destroy a Presidency by Andrew C. McCarthy, Encounter Books, 2019. Available at amazon.com
On January 27, 1998, First Lady Hillary Clinton claimed in an interview with Matt Lauer that reportage and investigation of the relationship between President Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky was the product of a “vast right-wing conspiracy that has been conspiring against my husband since the day he announced for president.”
Of course some conservatives had spent years trying to dig up real dirt to demonstrate that Clinton’s character disqualified him for public office. A handful had even fallen into the trap of thinking that the end justifies the means, manipulating or manufacturing evidence to serve their purposes. But “vast right-wing conspiracy” quickly attained infamy as unbelievably ill-informed at best, attempted calumniation or paranoid at worst.
Andrew McCarthy’s Ball of Collusion, The Plot to Rig an Election and Destroy a Presidency implicitly shows that Mrs. Clinton’s remark may not have been calumny or paranoid or grounded in remarkable ignorance. It could well have been the result of an assumption that conservatives act in the same way as members of the Democratic Party. Had her remarks referred to the more recent of investigations of President Donald Trump and spoken of a “vast left-wing conspiracy,” they would be all too accurate.
That the Democratic Party has spent three years grasping at straws in an effort to remove Trump from office and obstruct his agenda is by now so obvious that the president is defended by more than a few “moderate Republicans” who only a short time ago inclined toward the “Never Trump” faction’s effort to run their own man in 2016 or even voted for Hillary Clinton as the “establishment candidate.”
But the full extent of the Democrats’ nefariousness remains comparatively little-known, if only because the facts are far too extensive and detailed to be contained within television news and talk radio sound bites. Even McCarthy’s book, exhaustively researched as it is, limits itself to the actions of leading Democrats, their cohorts in American intelligence agencies and law enforcement, and their foreign allies during the 2016 campaign and their post-election allegations of collusion between Trump and Russia.
The story behind the allegations that Trump attempted to force Ukraine to take action which would aid the president’s upcoming re-election campaign — to which the Democrats have turned since their case for collusion with Russia collapsed and which have served as the flimsy basis for an impeachment — form no part of McCarthy’s book and might well provide material for another volume.
In contrast to the handful of vaguely suggestive incidents which the left attempted to use as the foundation for a collusion case, the Obama administration, the Clinton campaign and leftist journalists have, between them (and among other things), actively colluded with foreign intelligence agents to spy on the Trump campaign, manufactured news stories and then misrepresented their own prior assertions when the latter were proven to be erroneous and used government agencies to engage in cover-ups of Democrat misdeeds, spy on Trump and the Senate and further their partisan political agenda.
During the 2016 campaign, for example, Obama’s Justice Department and FBI did not stop at glossing over Clinton’s illegal use of a private Internet service for classified documents (to ensure she remained the candidate opposed to Trump). It also failed to act on reports that Russian agents were attempting to meddle in the election (to avoid calling attention to the issue and so to prevent conservatives from claiming that either Russian interference or a putative attempt to forestall it resulted in a fraudulent Clinton victory) while Obama’s administration asserted that election tampering was impossible.
Supporters of Obama and Clinton within American intelligence agencies and law enforcement further skirted the law in their attempts to investigate Donald Trump both during his campaign and after his election. In some cases they relied upon foreign agents to engage in forms of surveillance for which U.S. officials require court authorization. In other cases they found pretexts for investigating some of Trump’s associates to obtain warrants allowing them to conduct investigations which were used as facades for a mere fishing expedition into the affairs of the current president in the hopes that it would produce information to serve their agenda.
All such investigations found nothing, but after the “unelectable” Donald Trump had defeated the “unbeatable most qualified presidential candidate in history” the left needed to explain away the election result while undermining the new president’s legitimacy. So investigations based upon the aforesaid methods — or based upon allegations which were themselves grounded either in such methods or in unsubstantiated claims — were ratcheted up in an effort to undermine a president with the basic human decency to stand up to the globalist, multiculturalist, socially liberal agenda.
These are just some of the facts which McCarthy expounds in detail in a story which could serve as the basis for a spy thriller movie. Just don’t expect Hollywood to make one.
