Government by innuendo in the United States
© 2018 Peter Free
18 December 2018
The latest in the American vacuity trend began with — Robert Mueller
To date, after 19 or so months of trying, the Special Counsel has produced nothing (of substance) to implicate President Trump in colluding with the Russian government.
That, you recall, was the job he was explicitly hired to do — and to confine himself to. Instead, we have a number of conceptually unrelated indictments of some of Trump's associates.
These charges allege the kind of ordinary criminality that anyone in 2016 should have suspected might underpin a business empire like the one belonging to our rules-flouting President.
It would have been more honorable . . .
. . . and certainly more constitutionally lawful — to have investigated those suspicions on properly attributed investigative authority. Rather than on partisanly concocted claims of quasi-treason.
Counsel Mueller unfortunately extended the range of his "the Russians did it" investigation to include matters that he apparently had no lawfully assigned business investigating. That is why he hands these tidbits off to other people to prosecute.
Gotta keep his partisan Machiavellian hands clean.
Curiously
Nobody, except Trumpians, seems to mind the legality lapse.
Evidently it is okay with us, if one partisan half of the electorate gives a Special Someone government-sponsored authority to dig dirt on the leader of the other half.
A more subtly effective recipe for generating Constitution-defying chaos, I cannot imagine.
That Mueller's overstepped investigative authority never caught much public attention — says volumes about our society's fundamental lack of interest in the rule of law.
And now, corresponding tomfoolery
Republicans have been spreading the counter-rumor that the FBI intentionally set Trump up, before 2016's election took place:
Just before Thanksgiving, House Republicans amended the list of documents they’d like President Trump to declassify in the Russia investigation.
Sources tell me the targeted documents may provide the most damning evidence to date of potential abuses of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) . . . .
The email exchanges . . . occurred in early to mid-October [presumably 2016], before the FBI successfully secured a FISA warrant to spy on Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.
The email exchanges show the FBI was aware . . . that there were . . . concerns about the reliability of the evidence used to support it: the Christopher Steele dossier.
But the FBI withheld from the American public and Congress, until months later, that Steele had been paid to find his dirt on Trump by a firm doing political opposition research for the Democratic Party and for Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, and that Steele himself harbored hatred for Trump.
If the FBI knew of . . . the concerns about the reliability of his dossier before seeking the warrant, it would constitute a serious breach of FISA regulations . . . .
That’s because the FBI has an obligation to certify to the court before it approves FISA warrants that its evidence is verified, and to alert the judges to any flaws in its evidence or information that suggest the target might be innocent.
© 2018 John Solomon, FBI email chain may provide most damning evidence of FISA abuses yet, The Hill (05 December 2018) (excerpts)
Notice "Opinion Contributor" Solomon's flame-spewing title
"May provide most damning evidence of FBI abuses."
How's that for an evidence-lacking, inflammatory accusation?
It certainly ranks with the Democrat-Deep State's quasi-treason-accusing assignment of Robert Mueller to harass the Republican president.
Lies begetting lies.
Distortions birthing distortions.
Overwhelmed Truth, eventually suiciding on stupidity's pyre.
This is our country, these days
A lot of hostilely vacuous and evidence-avoiding hot air.
Perpetrated by oligarchs, of one brand or another.
And taken to be competing gospels by our population of furiously milling, paradoxically complacent sheep.
Laughably further
"Conservative" Kurt Schlichter inadvertently summed American vacuity's fashionableness. But somehow without recognizing his own contribution to it:
Let’s stop pretending that America in 2018 has a “justice system.”
It’s a set of elite institutions that swing the law like a sledgehammer to crush threats to the ruling class’s monopoly on power.
If you are ex-military . . . or if you aren’t a mouth-breathing half-wit, ask yourself – if you had done a fraction of what that Looming Doofus James Comey says Felonia Milhous von Pantsuit [Hillary Clinton] did with classified material, what would you be doing right now?
You’d be in your cell . . . .
Not her, though. Not a member of the establishment.
The rules apply to us Normals. The rules do not apply to them.
Now we have Robert Mueller and his pack of Democrats . . . seeking out a crime, any crime, or any non-crime, that they can use to undo the results of the election.
No Russian collusion? Ok, well, then, uh, paying off a couple of extortionist tramps is . . . a campaign finance violation . . . .
[T]hat’s part of the scam. If you apply laws in a bizarre and inexplicable way that no one can foresee, you can jam-up people who could have never imagined that their conduct was illegal.
Creative charges, matched with prosecutorial discretion that always means charging the hell out of the conservative dissenter and always letting the liberal elitist off, and the ruling class has a powerful tool to dismantle the opposition.
[Donald Trump] should pardon everyone.
Pardon Flynn, and Manafort, and Papadopliswhateverhisnameis.
Pardon Stone and Corsi. Pardon Don, Jr., Jared, and Ivanka. Pardon Melania and Barron. Pardon Pence, and Pence’s pets.
And then he should pardon himself.
For everything. Take it all off the table. Strip the elite of its ability to coerce perjury and ruin lives for the sin of dissenting.
© 2018 Kurt Schlichter, Pardon Everyone (Except That Rat Cohen), Townhall (17 December 2018)
The moral? — Yes, Kurt, this is what happens when concerns for Truth and Integrity disappear
Too bad that you're a part of the problem.
Sad also, that the rest of us are too complacently clueless — even to recognize the issue.