News yesterday of indictments handed down by Special Counsel Robert Mueller against 13 Russians involved in various crimes against our republic serve as a not-so-gentle-reminder of the serial dishonesty, moral turpitude, and lack of fitness of the current occupant of the White House.
Having declared dozens of times since his election that charges of Russian meddling were a "hoax" and along the way, trashing the reputations of several patriotic Americans, his own appointees, and the entire intelligence community of the United States, the President is revealed once again to simply have no ability to process and distribute information reasonable people can consider to be true. He long ago surrendered the high ground on this issue, one that would have allowed him to state that while Hillary Clinton's flawed campaign was the reason she lost the election, Russia's interference was both obvious and unacceptable, and that he was determined to see that it never happens again. Lending further evidence to his utter inability to see the threat from Russia, a remarkable series of statements before a Senate panel last week, the six heads of America's various intelligence agencies ALL testified that they had not received any explicit direction from the President to guard against Russian meddling in the 2018 election.
I don't know where the Mueller investigation will ultimately lead. Were these indictments part of a grander roll-up that will ultimately lead to evidence of conspiracy? Or were they the end of the line, evidence only of Russian-sponsored mayhem without any connection to the candidate? Neither conclusion can be reached from the information in the 37 page indictment . I urge you to read the indictment, and then look back in time to your social media activities during the election and consider how similar some of the statements and activities were to things people you know were passing along.
I continue to believe that if the President is nicked for anything out of this investigation, it will be for financial reasons (tax evasion being the most likely). Even if it were to be proved that say--for instance--his digital operation provided "targets" to the Russians for their information operation--the likelihood that it could or will be proven to have occurred with his knowledge or permission is low. The country could ultimately be confronted with the truth that his campaign engaged in conspiracy without the same level of certainty that he was part of it. Removal of the President is of course, a political act, and it is doubtful that he would be removed in that situation. The other way of removing a President is to defeat him, and if the foregoing evidence were presented to the electorate, perhaps a better decision will be made in 2020.
Saturday, February 17, 2018
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5 comments:
Everything you say in this post is true. But what is the greater danger? This gross man in the White House, checked at every turn by the press, half the Congress (including many Republicans), most of the Judiciary, almost all of the bureaucracy (including the elements of the surveillance state), all of his most important cabinet appointees, and the "Resistance" at-large. Or, Hillary with unchecked power -- the only major party nominee known to have colluded with the Russians. She alone paid Russian sources for dirt on her opponent (laundered through the DNC, which she controlled, and more directly from her campaign to Perkins Coie and thence through Fusion GPS and the unregistered foreign agent Christopher Steele). Moreover, she would by and large not have been opposed by our major institutions.
I wish Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio (or before them the gay bashing, "binders full of women", dog-abusing, cancer-causing, horrible Mitt Romney) could have had a shot at confronting our corrupt institutions. Unfortunately, we only have Trump. He is the President we deserve.
Silly question. Hillary is not going to be the President. The one we have was elected, and no matter how bad he is or how criminal he is or how immoral he is, she is not going to be President. How he got to be is the important question--one worth Mr. Mueller's time and effort.
The "silly" question goes to how we got here. I think any serious person needs to understand that in order to gain insight into how we get out.
The greater danger was that Hillary (who you point out, lost), would not do anything to reform our corrupt institutions, and that the corruption would grow deeper.
Moreover, Mueller's legitimate role is to prosecute crimes. The only crimes I have seen evidence of were Trump associate crimes unrelated to the question of "collusion" and actual "collusion" with the Russians by the DNC and the Hillary campaign. His job is not to determine if it's only "worth [his] time and effort" to look for crimes by the President. That would be a lawless endeavor. Justice is blind.
Hillary is not our President, so we stand a better chance to roll back her allies deeply in control of the unaccountable administrative state.
I don't love The Donald, although I do support almost everything he has done in office (as opposed to what he has said in office, and done over the years in private). But I think you've lost perspective, Commander. I recommend you read Ann Althouse's blog. She is a recently retired law professor at the U of Wisconsin, who voted for Obama twice. I hope it will broaden your horizons, as it has done mine. http://althouse.blogspot.com/2018/02/for-past-year-donald-trump-has.html
Silly questions, silly indictments.
Here is some more information to broaden your horizons. Powerline is a blog hosted by three conservative lawyers who all used to be on the left in their youth. They met at Dartmouth in the 70's and along with Steve Hayward (a lifelong conservative and a prominent Reagan scholar at the Hoover Institution at Stanford) now maintain the blog. Paul Mirengoff, who until recently practiced law in Washington, DC published this post today ; it uses the s-word too: http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2018/02/a-silly-indictment.php
For a conservative, even if it is of the Wahoo variety, you need to get out more.
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