By CHRISTOPHER MANION
The Deadwood Media are at it again, trumpeting the “news” that Republicans are desperate — they’re sure to lose the Congress in November. Proof? Why, even President Trump is haranguing Speaker Paul Ryan and the GOP leadership for bailing out on their campaign promises!
Regarding Ryan, all too true: Instead of passing separate appropriations bills that the president could sign or reject, exercising some fiscal restraint, the speaker sealed the deal on passing a bloated “Omnibus” spending bill, complete with full funding of Planned Parenthood and scant funding for Trump’s promised border wall — thus alienating, in quick succession, deficit hawks, pro-lifers, and advocates of the rule of law, three constituencies without which we’d all be suffering through Hillary’s endless fireside chats.
But let’s face it — while these GOP fissures are genuine, at least they represent a real dynamic — the establishment vs. the heartland. The battle between principles and position in the Grand Old Party rages on.
Meanwhile, the D.C. Deadwoods beat the hollow drum: “Bash Trump,” 24/7. But the president hasn’t resigned in shame! The Usual Suspects cannot believe that Trump has a backbone — it’s so rare in Washington that those in the know assure each other that Trump must be crazy. And yet, they realize that if Speaker Paul Ryan had a backbone too, they’d really be in trouble.
While the center-ring circus goes non-stop NeverTrump, few media savants are talking about actual Democrats, and for a good reason: There’s nothing to talk about. The only thing Democrats stand for is opposing Trump. Of course, they are now the official party of “abortion rights,” but all that got them was a rare put-down from Cardinal Dolan. Then they got a slap in the face from Chicago voters who insisted on voting for Cong. Dan Lipinski, the last pro-life Democrat on Capitol Hill, for reelection this fall.
Credit their silence to fearful paralysis. This November, 35 Senate seats will be in play, and 26 of them are now held by Democrats who have no coherent platform to run on. In order to ignore the impending deluge, the party line trumpets a “Blue Wave” that will undoubtedly take over the House of Representatives, we are told, which will immediately unite America by trying to impeach the president.
For the Democrats, that is policy. But beneath that venal veneer, the party is split between the Left and the Very Far Left — featuring Bernie Sanders backers who are as mad at Nancy Pelosi as they are at Trump. Of all the issues they can muster, the most prominent one is guns (never mentioning, of course, James Hodgkinson, the Sanders volunteer who brought an arsenal to a Virginia baseball field last June and tried to massacre dozens of Republicans).
The Long War
Below the surface there is a longer war going on, and Washington’s embedded establishment recognizes that it’s far from over. We now know that there are two major investigations under way. One is conducted by Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller, bent on finding something, anything, on Trump, or someone as close to him as possible. The other is directed by the Justice Department, and includes an investigation of the FBI and Justice centering on Andrew McCabe, who has just been fired for lying.
Mueller’s investigation focuses on Trump’s alleged “collusion” with Russia, while the other one focuses on an alleged effort by government insiders to bring down Trump using select and highly classified information gathered by intelligence services.
The illegal disclosure of classified information is an old reliable in the left’s political toolbox. Six years ago Ann Coulter described how Barack Obama’s early political career achieved success only with the help of such leaks. “Obama’s usual campaign method, used in 100 percent of his races, has been to pry into the private records of his opponents,” she wrote.
“Obama became a U.S. senator only by virtue of David Axelrod’s former employer, the Chicago Tribune, ripping open the sealed divorce records of Obama’s two principal opponents.” Both opponents — Blair Hull in Obama’s U.S. Senate primary, and Jack Ryan, in the U.S. Senate general election, had been through nasty divorces, and in both cases information from records sealed by the courts mysteriously appeared in the Tribune.
Obama, behind in the polls in both races before the revelations, won both elections.
It is an unlovely and fallen world we live in, to be sure. In the decades since the Chicago machine delivered for Obama, our intelligence agencies have amassed so much information that Thomas Drake, a former senior official at the National Security Agency (NSA), warns of a “Turnkey Tyranny.” No one knows for sure, but it’s likely that the NSA has every email, phone call, and every other electronic communication you and I have made in the past decade and more. Drake feared that the wrong person might come to power and “pry into” that super-secret information trove, Big-Brother style.
Working inside the system, Drake advocated limiting the information-gathering to credible threats — suspected terrorists and the like. But his superiors insisted it was easier just to spy on all of us. When Drake quietly lodged an objection with his superiors, he was hounded from the NSA and ruined (but never charged) by Comey’s FBI. He now works in an Apple Store in Maryland.
But Wait, There’s More!
The longtime Che-and-Fidel-friendly left is alarmed — the Russians are coming! Meanwhile, the Fake Media studiously ignore genuine threats from China. Just four years ago, the criminal lassitude of Obama officials at the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) allowed hackers in Communist China to obtain over twenty million files of current and past applicants for U.S. government jobs and security clearances. The files include information routinely gathered by investigators conducting confidential background checks. This data is a treasure trove for China’s silent blackmailers.
Had Trump allowed such a massive security breach, the Echo Chamber would be filled with cries for impeachment. But Obama was president, so nobody bothered to prosecute his grossly negligent officials at OPM.
Speaking of information gathering, a real threat is emerging from major social media and technology companies. They want to control the information that users share with one another through their popular “social media” platforms.
In the lead is the Facebook-Google-Twitter conglomerate, which has quietly instituted politically correct algorithms — that is, censorship filters — to reduce the visibility of conservative, and especially pro-life, organizations and individuals. Some groups already report a drop of almost half of their capability to reach their contacts on the “social media” sites that tens of millions of Americans routinely use for sharing such information.
Social media information is valuable to politicians, too. Trump critics recently charged that Cambridge Analytica, a firm hired as part of his presidential campaign’s research operation, had amassed Facebook data on fifty million users to in their voter mobilization efforts. Days later, it was revealed that the Obama campaign had done the same thing in 2012.
In fact, on March 18, Carol Davidsen, Obama for America’s director of data integration and media analytics, bragged on Twitter that “we were able to suck out the whole [Facebook] social graph, but they didn’t stop us once they realized that was what we were doing.”
What was illegal for Trump’s vendor was fine for Obama? How does that work? Davidsen explains: “They [Facebook officials] came to [Obama for America’s] office in the days following election recruiting & were very candid that they allowed us to do things they wouldn’t have allowed someone else to do because they were on our side.”
“Illegal for me but not for thee.” Business as usual in Washington.
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