https:\/\/www.city-journal.org\/html\/real-fisa-scandal-15706.html<\/a><\/p>\nThe Real FISA Scandal by Andrew Klavan.<\/p>\n
Subtitle: a bill for eight years of willful media blindness is starting to come due. \u00a0Published in City Journal 2\/4\/2018<\/p>\n
Scandal is not an exact science. But on a scale of \u201cnothingburger\u201d (Bret Stephens of the\u00a0New York Times)\u00a0to \u201cworse than Watergate\u201d (GOP congressman Steve King), the information in the House Intelligence Committee FISA Memo comes in at about a solid seven. It now seems very likely the FBI and Department of Justice deceived a FISA court with an uncorroborated piece of Democrat-funded oppo research in order to obtain a warrant to spy on American citizen Carter Page. If, as seems reasonable to conjecture, the broader target turns out to have been the Donald Trump presidential campaign for which Page had recently worked, the needle on the scandal meter will begin to edge up into the red zone.<\/p>\n
Let\u2019s put it this way: if this sort of thing had gone on under President Trump or even George W. Bush, the Times\u00a0would have announced the news in front-page headlines so large it would have taken two strong men just to carry the letters to the press room. An enormous collection of\u00a0Times\u00a0reportage on the subject\u2014with a black cover and some title like \u201cThe Path to Tyranny\u201d\u2014would have been on the bookstore shelves within the month.<\/p>\n
And yet mainstream journalism\u2019s reaction to the memo has so diverged from its past practices\u2014and indeed from the media\u2019s usual narrative about its own heroic role in our republic\u2014that it constitutes a sort of meta-scandal within the scandal that in some ways is more dispiriting than the FISA scandal itself.<\/p>\n
America\u2019s news centers\u2014from 42nd Street in Manhattan all the way to 57th Street in Manhattan\u2014did everything within their power to suppress, taint, and minimize the impact of the memo, even before they knew what was in it. \u201cPresident Trump\u2019s assault on the nation\u2019s law enforcement apparatus is unlike anything America has seen in modern times,\u201d wailed a\u00a0Times\u00a0\u201canalysis\u201d (the paper\u2019s term of art for front-page editorializing). \u201cThe memo is the most explicit Republican effort yet to discredit the FBI\u2019s investigation into Trump and Russia,\u201d reports CNN, increasingly the most trusted name in hysteria.<\/p>\n
-break-<\/p>\n
The article is rather long but worth the time it takes to read the entire piece, at the link posted above. City Journal comes from the Manhattan Institute, a think tank that seems to be taking a rather jaundiced view of \u201ctrends\u201d in society and their effects on people in general.<\/p>\n
This is eight months later, Kavanaugh is the SCJ nominee (probably the best choice) and Donald McGahn is White House Counsel. Coincidence? I don\u2019t think so.<\/p>\n
McGahn is cooperating with the Special Counsel Investigation into whether or not there was collusion with the Russians (which ones, for Pete\u2019s sake??!?!?) to tamper with the election in 2016.<\/p>\n
So the question about McGahn\u2019s \u201cspill\u201d to NYT and SCI is simple: is he feeding them stuff with Trump\u2019s consent, or is he in cahoots with them? I\u2019d say he\u2019s feeding them stuff, enough to make them look as bad as they are. By “bad”, I mean scrambling to find a way to get rid of Trump before his term of office ends. It comes up occasionally in news articles.<\/p>\n
And you have to wonder why, in view of the damaging things that were done by the previous administration \u2013 things that were an obvious intent to subvert a legitimate government \u2013 why were the media mavens so eager to fall in line behind someone whose sole intent was to destroy their freedom to be stupid fools? Why are they so blind to it?<\/p>\n
Well, my response is simple: take a hard, hard look at the dumbfuckery that Ernest Hemingway got himself into by agreeing to write article for NKVD publications here in the USA and overseas. He certainly wasn\u2019t stupid, by any measure. He was a war correspondent. He drove an ambulance during WWI and subsequently got a news gig during the early days of the war in Europe, which included Franco\u2019s attacks on the Spanish government, to report the news to US media centers. He did file reports steadily, probably by telegraph or possibly by telephone or wireless radio. What he did not see or understand, until the very end of his life when he was kicked out of Cuba by Fidel Castro and lost his home La Finca in Havana to the Cuban government, was that he was never viewed as anything but a pawn in the game of spreading communism.<\/p>\n
A few weeks ago, I reported on \u2018Writer, Sailor, Soldier, Spy\u2019, a biography of Hemingway by Robert Conquest. I got five chapters into that and had to put it down, because I really wanted to punch Hemingway as hard as I could. How anyone with his level of intelligence could be so easily duped was beyond me, but the NKVD people in New York, Europe, and elsewhere knew exactly how to feed his ridiculous ego enough to do that, and at the end, after writing \u2018The Old Man and the Sea\u201d, his last novel, he realized how much he had been had. He ended his life because of it.<\/p>\n
He was nothing but a tool in the very skilled hands of Stalin\u2019s spy\/propaganda network. That applies to the entire pack of idiots scrambling now to find some way to get rid of Trump ASAP. With them, it seems to start in kindergarten and roll all the way into college, fed every bit of believable stupidity you can possibly imagine, and throw in some Tootsie Rolls while you\u2019re at it.<\/p>\n
I don\u2019t know whether to be angry at these fools, or just point at them and laugh, because they are leading themselves into a swamp that drains into a black hole and will never leave it if they don\u2019t see how they\u2019ve trapped themselves. At this point, I don\u2019t care what happens to them. The power hungry people in Washington who are now scrambling eagerly to try to find a way to dump Trump are digging their own black holes right now.<\/p>\n
But that question still goes unanswered: why are they so willfully blind to the traps they are setting for themselves?<\/p>\n
Why?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I held off posting this article because the author’s bluntness generated my own questions. \u00a0I’m only … The Real FISA Scandal<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":653,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[209],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-81360","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-teh-stoopid"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81360","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/653"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=81360"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81360\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=81360"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=81360"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=81360"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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