Counterfeit Elitism

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Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness

Those damn dairy farmers. Why do they insist on trying to govern? Or, put another way:

Why are Republicans trusting Devin Nunes to be their oracle of truth!? A former dairy farmer who House intel staffers refer to as Secret Agent Man because he has no idea what’s going on.

Thus spoke MSNBC panelist, Yale graduate, former Republican “strategist,” and Bush administration speechwriter Elise Jordan.

Jordan likely knows little about San Joaquin Valley family dairy farmers and little notion of the sort of skills, savvy, and work ethic necessary to survive in an increasingly corporate-dominated industry. Whereas dairy farmer Nunes has excelled in politics, it would be hard to imagine Jordan running a family dairy farm, at least given the evidence of her televised skill sets and sobriety.

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Swamp Things?

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Victor Davis Hanson // National Review

No doubt people talk indiscreetly when they believe their communications are private; perhaps those in an illicit affair may posture and brag about their self-importance and exaggerate. All that said, when reading through the latest release of the Page-Strzok archive, one is struck not just that the two who eventually were to investigate Donald Trump did not like Trump, but rather that they utterly loathed him, given their banter back and forth included: “God trump is a loathsome human.” Or “And wow, Donald Trump is an enormous d**che.” Or “And Trump should go f himself.” Or “I am riled up. Trump is a f***ing idiot.”

It is hard to imagine how the Mueller investigation was not tainted by such venom — or perhaps the hate is better understood as proof that both were uniquely qualified to serve on the Mueller team doing the holy work deemed necessary to save the progressive project.

And perhaps the two had even more disdain for the supposed white working class who supported this “loathsome human”: e.g., cf., “from buttf*** Texas . . . ” Or “Just went to a southern Virginia Walmart. I could SMELL the Trump support . . . ” Or “Loudon is being gentrified, but it’s still largely ignorant hillbillys [sic].”

Anyone trying to chronicle the supposed pretensions and arrogance of a deep-state, deplorables/irredeemables/clingers/dairy-farmer–hating elite could not make all this up, especially the idea that a Trump supporter gives off a unique odor, real or metaphorical.

Of course, if two FBI amorous agents/attorneys in 2008 were investigating candidate or president-elect Obama and their correspondence was later revealed to be anything like the above about him or his constituents, they would have long ago been fired, no questions asked.

FISA-Gate is Scarier than Watergate

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Victor Davis Hanson // National Review

The Watergate scandal of 1972–74 was uncovered largely because of outraged Democratic politicians and a bulldog media. They both claimed that they had saved American democracy from the Nixon administration’s attempt to warp the CIA and FBI to cover up an otherwise minor, though illegal, political break-in.

In the Iran-Contra affair of 1985–87, the media and liberal activists uncovered wrongdoing by some rogue members of the Reagan government. They warned of government overreach and of using the “Deep State” to subvert the law for political purposes.

We are now in the middle of a third great modern scandal. Members of the Obama administration’s Department of Justice sought court approval for the surveillance of Carter Page, allegedly for colluding with Russian interests, and extended the surveillance three times.

But none of these government officials told the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that the warrant requests were based on an unverified dossier that had originated as a hit piece funded in part by the Hillary Clinton campaign to smear Donald Trump during the current 2016 campaign.

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A Year of Achievement: the case for the Trump presidency

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Victor Davis Hanson // National Review

As President Trump finished his first full year in office, he could look back at an impressive record of achievement of a kind rarely attained by an incoming president — much less by one who arrived in office as a private-sector billionaire without either prior political office or military service. As unintended proof of his accomplishments, Trump’s many liberal opponents have gone from initially declaring him an incompetent to warning that he has become effective — insanely so — in overturning the Obama progressive agenda.

Never Trump Republicans acknowledge that Trump has realized much of what they once only dreamed of — from tax reform and deregulation to a government about-face on climate change, the ending of the Obamacare individual mandate, and expansion of energy production.

Trump so far has not enacted the Never Trump nightmare agenda. The U.S. is not leaving NATO. It is not colluding with Vladimir Putin, but maintaining sanctions against Russia and arming Ukrainians. It is not starting a tariff war with China. The administration is not appointing either liberals or incompetents to the federal courts.

A politicized FBI, DOJ, and IRS was Obama’s legacy, not Trump’s doing, as some of the Never Trump circle predicted. Indeed, the Never Trump movement is now mostly calcified, as even some of its formerly staunch adherents concede. It was done in by the Trump record and the monotony of having to redefine a once-welcomed conservative agenda as suddenly unpalatable due to Trump’s crude fingerprints on it.

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The FISA-Gate Boomerangs

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Victor Davis Hanson // National Review

Some things still do not add up about the so-called Steele dossier, FISA warrants, the Nunes memo, and the hysterical Democratic reaction to it.

A Big Deal or a Nothing Deal?

1) Progressives and Democrats warned on the eve of the memo’s release that it would cause havoc throughout the intelligence agencies, by exposing classified means and processes.

When no serious intelligence expert claimed that the released memo had done such damage, the official response to the memo was suddenly recalibrated by progressives. It went from being radioactive to a “nothingburger.”

The obvious conclusion is cynical: Cry Armageddon to prevent its release, then, after the release, resort to yawns to downplay its significance. An even more cynical interpretation is that Rod Rosenstein, James Comey, and other officials stridently objected to the release of the memo because they are named in it. Comey incoherently mocked the memo’s purported unimportance even while listing all its deleterious effects and the crises that would ensue.

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The Ticking Memo

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Victor Davis Hanson // National Review

The House Intelligence Committee memo is pretty simple. It should not have been classified and thus far withheld from the public. In fact, far more information now needs to be released.

Despite the outcry, as Chairman Devin Nunes clarified, the memo can easily be in the near future supported or refuted by adducing official documents. In other words, the memo makes a series of transparent statements and leaves it up to the criminal-justice system and the public to ascertain subsequent criminal liability.

It is likely that the basic accuracy of the document will not be questioned, but rather opponents, some of them mentioned in the memo, will either ask why the resulting embarrassing information needed to be aired or insist that there are only minor possible crimes in the events it narrates, or both. Remember, officials from the FBI supposedly read the memo before its release to ensure that there were not factual errors or misrepresentations.

In sum, on four occasions during and after the 2016 campaign, the FBI and DOJ approached a federal FISA court — established to allow monitoring of foreign nationals engaged in efforts to harm the U.S. or American citizens deliberately or inadvertently in their service — to surveil Carter Page, a sometime Trump adviser. These requests also mentioned George Papadopoulos, apparently as a preexisting target of an earlier investigation by FBI official Peter Strzok, but according to the memo mysteriously there was not adduced any direct connection between the two individuals’ activities.

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Radioactive Trump

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Victor Davis Hanson // Defining Ideas

Hillary Clinton seems to be experiencing a strange, slow motion meltdown following her 2016 loss to Donald Trump. Recently, she sent out a Twitter video message, recorded on her cellphone camera, with advice to feminists:  “And let me just say, this is directed to the activist bitches supporting bitches. So let’s go.” At about the same time, she appeared at the Grammy Awards, via a video, reading a snippet about Trump’s fast-food eating habits from Michael Wolff’s widely discredited book, Fire and Fury.

Before Clinton ran against Trump, she was considered a cautious Democratic politician, albeit with a dubious ethical record. Yet after she tangled with Trump, she seems to be suffering mysterious after-effects. Call it radiation sickness from Trump’s toxic gamma rays. Translated, that means orthodox politicians often lose when they try dueling with the unorthodox Trump on his terms—and then, making matters worse, they end up doubling down with more emotional heat.

Early on during the Republican primary, a conventional wisdom developed in the media and within political circles that it was suicidal to engage in ad hominem exchanges with Trump. The mainstream media meant that assessment as no compliment to Trump. Journalists sneered that the showboating Trump had fourteen years of experience in repartee and ad hoc invective on his reality television hit show The Apprentice. They also conceded that Trump had long ago learned that, in the dog-eat-dog world of New York real estate, and in the nasty gossip of Manhattan’s celebrity scene, going on the preemptive offensive is a deterrence strategy, crude or not.  In such a landscape, gentlemanly forbearance was not interpreted as magnanimity to be appreciated but as weakness to be exploited.

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Rethinking the Geography of Power

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Victor Davis Hanson // National Review

Where the seats of power are located matters. Given the populist revolt in the United States and Europe against the so-called global elite, it is time to refigure the geography of governmental and transnational power.

Take the United Nations. Much of the international body’s perceived negatives derive from being in the world’s richest and most visible city, New York. But what if U.N. elites did not have easy access to instant television exposure, tony Manhattan digs, and who’s-who networking?

Most of the world is non-Western. Many Western elites are apologetic over past sins of imperialism and colonialism.

So why not move the United Nations to Haiti, Libya, or Uganda? The transference would do wonders for any underdeveloped country, financially, culturally, or psychologically. U.N. officials without easy access to Westernized media and the high life might instead have more time to concentrate on global problems such as hunger, disease, and violence — and be personally enmeshed in the dangers they address.

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Slashing at the Shadows of Trump

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Victor Davis Hanson // National Review

Trump’s publicly well-received speech (we hope the Obama first-person singular continues to give way to the Trump first-person plural) did not register with his enemies, mostly progressives but some Never Trumpers as well.

But what if Trump follows up on his speech by letting his successful policies speak for themselves, even as his critics are permanently stuck in the past obsessing on the shadows of Trump — oblivious to his record and brawling against a style and comportment that could be increasingly dissipating?

After watching the Democratic and celebrity boilerplate reaction to Trump’s speech, and the Kennedy response, a person from Mars might conclude that Trump was sober and judicious in reviewing a tangible record, while his critics were emotional and petulant while ignoring definable reality to focus on nebulous symbolism.

The result would be analogous to the effects of a strong but completed chemotherapeutic regimen that sickened the host while treating successfully the malady. That is, while Trump’s critics are stuck still on his campaign and first-year invective, they are oblivious to the utility of the medicine on the host. But patients often stop damning the side effects of their beneficial therapy once it ends and the positive effect on their health becomes tangible.

From Conspiracy Theories to Conspiracies

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Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness

Not all conspiracy theorists are unhinged paranoids—even when they insist there was a loosely organized if not sometimes incoherent effort to destroy Donald Trump’s candidacy beyond the bounds of “normal” politics and later a renewed and unprecedented endeavor to abort his presidency.

After all, did anyone believe that in the year 2017 the losing side in an American election would immediately dub itself the “Resistance”—channeling the World War II nomenclature of the guerrilla campaign against the Nazi occupation of France? Or that the defeated candidate Hillary Clinton would formally embrace the imagery of liberationist patriots fighting a Nazi-like Trump’s occupation of the United States?

One ingredient for removing a president would entail a nonstop effort by the opposition to use the courts, the legislative branch, the investigatory agencies, and the administrative state to discredit, undermine, and remove an elected government. In modern terms, that might entail opponents suing to challenge the legitimacy of the election, perhaps by charging in court that according to “experts,” voting machines were dysfunctional and thus some state tallies were null and void.

The effort might embrace trying to subvert the Constitution by pressuring state electors not to honor their constitutionally defined responsibilities to vote in accordance with the popular vote in their respective states. It might also include an effort to introduce articles of impeachment in the House.

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