Did The FBI Vouch For The Crazy Russian Deal From The Steele Dossier?

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Paul Roderick Gregory // Forbes

The media’s promotion of an unverified dossier against Republican candidate, Donald Trump, failed to cement Hillary Clinton’s expected victory in November. If that were the whole story, the dossier would have faded from public view, the new President Trump would not have spent his first year fighting off charges of treason, and a much bigger story would not be getting ready to break.

What we did not know on election day was that the Christopher Steele dossier was bought and paid for by the Clinton Campaign and the DNC, that the dossier itself may have been part and parcel of a Kremlin disinformation campaign, and that a FISA (Federal Intelligence Surveillance) court apparently used one of its most bizarre claims to approve the surveillance of a Trump campaign advisor. We also have learned that the Steele dossier was commissioned by an opposition-research firm—Fusion GPS—that had Russia among its main clients.

In light of these disclosures, investigators must now determine if the leaders of the Democratic Party, not Trump, colluded with the Kremlin to produce what the Russians call “black PR” against Trump.

Continue reading “Did The FBI Vouch For The Crazy Russian Deal From The Steele Dossier?” →

Hillary’s ‘Sure’ Victory Explains Most Everything

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by Victor Davis Hanson// National Review

 

What exactly were top officials in the FBI and DOJ doing during the election of 2016?

The Page-Strzok text exchanges might offer a few answers. Or, as Lisa Page warned her paramour as early as February 2016, at the beginning of the campaign and well before the respective party nominees were even selected:

One more thing: she [Hillary Clinton] might be our next president. The last thing you need us going in there loaded for bear. You think she’s going to remember or care that it was more doj than fbi?

The traditional way of looking at the developing scandals at the FBI and among holdover Obama appointees in the DOJ is that the bizarre atmospherics from candidate and President Trump have simply polarized everyone in Washington, and no one quite knows what is going on.

Continue reading “Hillary’s ‘Sure’ Victory Explains Most Everything” →

Will Unfinished Train Overpasses Become California’s Stonehenge?

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by Victor Davis Hanson// National Review

 

The misbegotten project, now stalling, should never have been started.

 

Nobody quite knows who built Stonehenge some 5,000 years ago in southern England. The mysterious ring of huge stone monoliths stands mute.

 

Californians may leave behind similarly enigmatic monuments for puzzled future generations. Along a 119-mile pathway in central California, from Bakersfield to Madera, there are now huge, quarter-finished concrete overpasses. These are the totems of the initial segment of a planned high-speed-rail corridor.

 

Californians thought high-speed rail was a great idea when they voted for it in 2008. The state is overwhelmingly progressive. Silicon Valley reflects California’s confidence in new-age technology. Californians are among the highest-taxed citizens in the nation. They apparently are not opposed to borrowing and spending for ambitious government projects — especially to alleviate crowded freeways.

 

Planners assured voters that the cost for the first 520 miles was going to be an “affordable” $33 billion. The rail line seemed a good way to connect the state’s economically depressed interior with the affluent coastal corridor.
Continue reading “Will Unfinished Train Overpasses Become California’s Stonehenge?” →

Trump’s Midterm Known Unknowns

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by Victor Davis Hanson// National Review

 

‘Shy’ Trump voters, a booming economy, consumer confidence, looming investigations, anti-Trump frenzy — all add up to uncertainty in the 2018 elections.

 

Conventional wisdom and media hopes are now combining to warn us of what is shaping up as a Trump wipeout in the 2018 midterms.

 

Certainly, presidents with an approval rating below 50 percent usually lose more than 30 seats in the House. That crash would be more than enough to produce a Democratic majority and thus would ensure an impeachment proceeding designed to paralyze the remainder of Trump’s first term.

 

In the Senate, the Democrats have three times as many seats to defend (and lots of them in Trump-won states). Yet recently they are gaining confidence that they can flip enough races to deadlock or even win the Senate. The now-orthodox narrative about the midterm elections is increasingly hyped by the media as a “blowout” or “tsunami.”

 

Yet the dilemma is not just that we are ten months out from the election and relative party popularity is already gyrating, but that there are lots of landmark developments in play that we usually do not experience in any midterm election.

 

The first, of course, is Trump and the polls. No one knows whether the “Trump phenomenon” of 3–5 percent underreporting in the polls is still valid. The Rasmussen poll has Trump at 45 percent, about 5 percent higher than the gold-standard RealClearPolitics average of 40 percent — analogous to the Election Day outlier and often-scoffed-at polls by USC/Los Angeles Times and Investor’s Business Daily/TIPP. Anecdotally, most can attest that colleagues and friends still usually look both ways before whispering, “Wow, Trump is doing great.” It may be a mass phenomenon that, for some, expressing hesitation about Trump or even virtue-signaling about his excesses serves as psychological penance for voting for him. Continue reading “Trump’s Midterm Known Unknowns” →

Mythologies of Illegal Immigration

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By | American Greatness

The illegal immigration debate has come to a head once again. Congress remains at an impasse over a temporary spending bill that Senate Democrats refuse to support unless it includes a provision that would allow several hundred thousand illegal aliens to remain in the United States without fear of deportation. It’s a tiresome ploy by the Democrats, abetted by their allies in the media, using deceptive language to paint a false picture that blurs the distinction between legal and illegal, citizen and foreigner, justice and injustice.

Enough obfuscation. Here are some of the most pernicious myths of illegal immigration, debunked.

The System is “Broken”
Broken for whom exactly? Not for Mexico and Latin America. Together they garner $50 billion in annual remittances. The majority of such transfers are likely sent from illegal aliens.

Some of that largess is also subsidized by the entitlements American taxpayers pay that free up this disposable cash for sending abroad. In the eyes of Mexico and Latin America, the only thing that would make our system appear “broken” would be enforcing existing U.S. immigration law. Continue reading “Mythologies of Illegal Immigration” →

The Trillion-Dollar Chameleon

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by Victor Davis Hanson// National Review

 

Big Tech is hiding in plain sight.

 

Twenty years ago, no one had heard of either Facebook or Google, neither of which existed yet. For that matter, no one knew much about social media or search engines in general.

 

Cell phones were still simply mobile, small, and expensive telephones. There was no concept of a phone as a handheld computer.

 

Today, five companies — Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, and Alphabet (Google’s parent company) — have a collective worth of more than $3 trillion. Yet such transnational companies remain mostly exempt from the sort of regulations and accountability faced by most other industries.

 

Major corporations understandably fear product-liability laws. Oil companies are hectored by class-action lawsuits and headline-grabbing attorneys badgering them to pay up for supposed climate change brought on by commuters filling up each week. Tobacco companies have paid out billions of dollars due to cigarettes’ contribution to lung cancer. Pharmaceutical corporations are often forced to pay millions in fines when their prescription drugs cause dangerous side effects.

 

Yet every year, nearly a half-million Americans are injured in traffic accidents due to distracted driving involving a cell phone. No one knows how many millions of people worldwide are addicted to the apps on their smartphones — a habit that can be harder to break than an opiate addiction and can leave addicted users in a similar zombie-like condition. Yet unlike Big Pharma, Big Oil, and Big Tobacco, Big Tech is rarely held responsible for the deleterious effects of its products on millions the world over.
Continue reading “The Trillion-Dollar Chameleon” →

Can Countries Make Themselves Great Again?

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by Victor Davis Hanson
Wednesday, January 17, 2018

Is Donald Trump’s slogan “Make America great again” mere campaign rhetoric in the tradition of Barack Obama’s “hope and change,” George H. W. Bush’s “a kinder, gentler nation,” and Ronald Reagan’s “It’s morning in America again”? Or do such renaissances really occur in history?

The Roman Republic and Empire together lasted for more than 1,000 years. Yet at various times throughout this period, Rome was declared finished—like during the Punic Wars (264-146 BC), the Civil Wars of the late Republic (49-31 BC), and the coups and cruelty of the 12 Caesars (49 BC-AD 96), especially during the reigns of Caligula, Nero, and Domitian.

Inflation, revolts, barbarian invasions, corruption, and decadence were seen as insurmountable problems. Witnesses such as Livy, Tacitus, Petronius, and Suetonius all recorded that the Rome of their generation was simply too corrupt to continue. As Livy famously put it in the introduction to his massive history of Rome, written almost 500 years before its eventual implosion, “We can bear neither our diseases nor their remedies.”

In fact, throughout the centuries of these serial crises, Rome usually found ways to bear the necessary remedies. Often, it was saved through the intervention of exceptional generals like Scipio Africanus. Sometimes, stabilizing figures such as Augustus sought a moral revival. Effective rulers such as those whom Nicolò Machiavelli’s called the “Five Good Emperors”— Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, Antonius Pius, and Marcus Aurelius—gave the world 100 years of calm prosperity between AD 96-192. The magisterial Edward Gibbon described their century as an era when “the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous.” Continue reading “Can Countries Make Themselves Great Again?” →

Strategika Issue 47: The State of U.S. Naval Readiness

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Title: The Sinews of Empire
By Seth Cropsey
 
Originally published on Hoover.org
 
Modern scholars of politics revel in their complex descriptions of state action. Rather than oversimplifying and reducing the state to a unitary body, they separate its internal components and assess each of their relative strengths. There’s something to this. However, politics are contradictory. Man may create sprawling decision-making bodies, and systems that disperse power at multiple levels. Nevertheless, states are remarkably like people. They feel pride and anger, loyalty and hatred, fear and hope.
States are also structured like people. They have minds, hearts, and amorphous limbs with which to influence the world around them. Moreover, they have sinews, connective links that unite their metaphorical bone and muscle, tie their appendages together, and enable the use of power. Roads and internal thoroughfares are sinews common to every state.
 
 
 
 
Title: Cornstalks, Calvinball, And The Bridges At Toko Ri: Rightsizing The U.S. Navy
By Admiral James O. Ellis Jr.
 
Originally published on Hoover.org
 
The main street of Washington, Georgia, is called Toombs Avenue in honor of the Georgia senator and Civil War general who was born nearby. In promoting the South’s secession as the war approached, Toombs reportedly claimed, “We can beat those Yankees with cornstalks!” After fleeing to Paris after the South’s defeat, Toombs later returned, only to be reminded of his pre-war claim. Unrepentant to the end, Toombs replied, “Well they wouldn’t fight with cornstalks!” This story has been used for years in national security debates by those advocating for ever-advancing technologies, even at the expense of a larger force structure.
 
 
 
Title: A Stretched Navy And A Fiscal Disconnect
By Admiral Gary Roughead
 
Originally published on Hoover.org
 
Last year, within two weeks’ time, two deadly collisions of U.S. Navy ships in western Pacific sea-lanes brought home the reality of a Navy in increasing demand yet stretched precariously thin. The captains and those responsible on watch those nights, as they operated in congested Asian waters, were held to account, but it remains the nation that has allowed and accepted the conditions that led to those tragic events and the loss of 17 sailors. As articulated in a review of those incidents that I co-led, it has been a long road to the current level of reduced readiness, and it will not be turned around quickly.
 

 

What the ‘Dreamer’ fight is really about

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Op-Ed
By Victor Davis Hanson
Los Angeles Times
 

The loud fight over what will happen to America’s “Dreamers” isn’t what it seems. For both sides, it’s a fig leaf used to mask their true intentions.

In his first term, Barack Obama admitted that he had no constitutional authority (“I’m president, I’m not king”) to grant amnesties. Yet during his campaign for reelection in 2012 he created the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which conferred a temporary reprieve from deportation to young people brought to this country as minors.

Now Democrats are demanding the preservation and institutionalization of the DACA program. One day soon, they will likely demand its expansion. They do not control either house of Congress or the presidency. They do not enjoy a majority of state legislatures and governorships. To get their way, they are counting on either favorable public opinion or threats to shut down the government.

Democrats are so focused on the 800,000 Dreamers — less than 10% of the undocumented population — because they’re politically photogenic and for now seen as the easiest group to exempt from efforts to control illegal immigration. In blanket fashion, the media consistently report that they are model youth, fulfilling their proverbial “dreams” of finishing college and achieving upward mobility.

Setting aside the reality of the Dreamer pool, the Democrats’ method of fighting for DACA suggests that they are broadly in favor of letting immigration dysfunction continue apace. Why else would they refuse to give President Trump any significant concessions in the DACA negotiations — no wall, no end to chain migration, no cessation of visa lotteries?

They know that if this generation of Dreamers gets a pass without broader reform, it will be followed by another and another, all expecting the same eventual exemptions.

Democrats once used to talk about ending outright illegal immigration. They worried that it put downward pressure on wages. They thought it eroded union efforts and sapped political support among Democrats’ blue-collar base, while overtaxing finite social services to the detriment of the American underclass. Continue reading “What the ‘Dreamer’ fight is really about” →

This is CNN . . . in 1945

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By | January 15, 2018
American Greatness

What if something like CNN and modern communications were around in early 1945? What if the rules of presidential news coverage were then as they are now? And what if such a mythical CNN hated Franklin Delano Roosevelt as much as it despises Donald Trump, then as right-wing as it is now hard left? How would the daily news in a mythical 1945 treat a now-iconic FDR? What would the country have thought of its president?

In the manner that we’ve learned that Donald Trump supposedly eats double servings of fast food and gulps down a dozen diet sodas a day, we instead might hear similar CNN “exclusives” about presidential diet and health, either from “unknown” sources in the White House or “fake news” exaggerations of rumor and innuendo.

Wolf Blitzer might give us a news bulletin something like this: “CNN in an exclusive report has learned that President Roosevelt is a sick, maybe dying, man. But the true nature of his health has long been covered up, most notably in last year’s election and is even now more dishonesty hidden. CNN has learned that the conspiracy of silence among the president’s family, his staff, and his doctors is long-standing, scandalous—and, in this reporter’s view, dangerous.”

“Sources tell me that the president’s blood pressure routinely hits 240 over 140. He has lost 40 pounds. Some sources tell CNN that the president suffers from chronic sinus and urinary infections. He may be battling skin cancer. CNN is now learning that the president could never walk or even stand up on his own.”

“That image of a robust president was also inaccurate—the fiction of collusion that for years has hidden the true extent of the president’s paralysis from the American people. CNN has also learned that President Roosevelt has been absent from the White House for weeks at a time and has been too ill to work at his desk. Yet he continues to chain smoke and drink a series of stiff drinks each evening, a habit dating back to Prohibition before he was president.” Continue reading “This is CNN . . . in 1945” →

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