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Was the Civil War Necessary?
By Brion McClanahan
May 3, 2017

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Trump supposedly stepped in it. Again.
In an interview that aired Monday with Salena Zito, he wondered aloud that if better leadership could have prevented the Civil War [sic].
Trump thought that Andrew Jackson would have prevailed in a showdown between the North and the South. After all, he did it before in the 1830s. Trump then said this: “He [Jackson] was really angry that he saw what was happening with regard to the Civil War, he said, ‘There’s no reason for this.’”
Trump followed up by committing the most heinous of all heinous acts. He questioned if the Civil War [sic] was necessary!
The leftist media immediately pounced, with several openly mocking Trump for believing that Andrew Jackson was alive in 1861.
Time to buy old US gold coins
A USA Today headline read: “Note to Donald Trump: Andrew Jackson wasn’t alive for the Civil War.”
The LA Times: “Trump makes puzzling claim about Andrew Jackson, Civil War.” The Chicago Tribune ran the same headline (groupthink) as did a number of other “news” outlets.
Social media trolls ran post after post criticizing Trump’s “revisionist” history, lambasting him for not knowing when Jackson was alive, or that he dared to buck modern historical interpretation. The snarky liberal establishment dimwit historian Kevin Krause Tweeted “When the Civil War came, Andrew Jackson had been dead fifteen years.”
Zing! You nailed him Dr. Kevin. How bright! How engaging! Only a Princeton prof could have come up with that one.
The congratulatory remarks rolled in from his “esteemed” colleagues.
And then The Atlantic staff lowered the boom. At least that is what they thought.
In only a matter of hours, this “news” magazine published two pieces on Trump’s supposed gaffe.
Young leftist twit David Graham published a piece titled “Trump’s Peculiar Understanding of the Civil War” in which he made a number of “peculiar” claims himself.
Graham suggested that: 1) “nullification” is unconstitutional because the federal courts say so. 2) “The Civil War [sic] was fought over slavery, and the insistence of Southern states that they be allowed to keep it.” 3) The Civil War [sic] wasn’t tragic because the “great thinker” Ta-Nehisi Coates said so in 2011. 4) War was inevitable because of the “Confederate states’ commitment to slavery.” 5) If Trump had read great history like Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Lincoln biography Team of Rivals, he would have a different position on the War—this position is hysterical.
Graham also dusted off the “Dunning school” pejorative in order to show his supposed intellectual superiority to the sitting president. After all, Graham insisted that Trump can’t be blamed for being such a dunderhead because even though he attended great schools, “Many Americans are still taught, incorrectly, that the war was essentially a conflict over state’s rights, with abolition as a byproduct of the war. This revisionist view flourished after the war, and though gradually being displaced, is common across the country.”
This is the revisionist calling traditional history revisionism.
The Atlantic followed up just over an hour later with a piece by Yoni Applebaum titled “Why There Was a Civil War.” The revisionist hits just kept coming.
Applebaum didn’t berate Trump for suggesting that historians don’t ask if the Civil War [sic] could have been avoided—he proved that this has been done for years by going through about a century of American historiography on the issue—but for claiming that the War could have been avoided and by “the omission of a critical word: slavery.” To Applebaum, the question of the War begins and ends with slavery and nothing but slavery. He provided one quote from Lincoln to prove his point and as most shallow Lincoln apologists do today, several quotes from the Southern States’ declaration of causes that seem to prove unequivocally that slavery and only slavery led to the War.
He concluded his article with a strange application of moral causation to the War, a moral causation that the vast majority of Americans missed in both 1860 and 1861 when the question of war or peace was still on the table. “There are some conflicts,” he wrote, “that a leader cannot suppress, no matter how strong he may be; some deals that should not be struck, no matter how alluring they may seem. This was the great moral truth on which the Republican Party was founded.”
If only it were that simple. And if only Lincoln was the great leader that both Graham and Applebaum believe him to be.
It seems both Graham and Applebaum fell asleep in class or at the very least have swallowed the Lincoln myth so thoroughly that no evidence to the contrary could persuade them of their folly or their revisionism.
Certainly, Trump is no scholar and his reverence for Jackson is troubling, for it was Jackson who provided the blueprint for Lincoln’s heavy handed tactics toward the South in 1861. To suggest that he would have worked out a compromise is a stretch, though he did support the deal Henry Clay brokered with South Carolina in 1832, a deal that resulted in the people of South Carolina nullifying the Force Bill and then heading home.
That is often lost in the story. Nullification worked and contrary to what Graham suggested, the federal court system has never had the final say on the constitutionality of nullification. That was always the point. States don’t ask permission from the federal courts to nullify unconstitutional legislation, and as every proponent of the Constitution swore in 1787 and 1788, including Alexander Hamilton and James Wilson, laws contrary to the Constitution would be void. Jefferson and Madison made it clear the States could void them.
The real problem with both pieces in The Atlantic, however, is the insistence that the War was inevitable and some moral conflict over slavery caused the shooting.
Applebaum understood that the entire fabric of early American history was built on compromise, but Graham seemed to miss that.
Based on the history of the United States, there was never an “irrepressible conflict” until the North decided to fabricate one.
The South, in fact, was willing to compromise in 1860 and 1861, as it had been for the eighty years prior. Jefferson Davis insisted that any compromise placed before the special Committee of 13 established to handle the crisis needed the support of both Republican and Democratic members. He could get the Democrats to support several. But the Republicans, at the insistence of president-elect Lincoln, said no to every single one. Is that the work of a leader?
That led six other Southern States out of the Union in early 1861. Lincoln could still have saved the Union through compromise at this juncture, but chose not to do so. As Senator James Bayard of Delaware stated in 1861, the Union still existed even with seven States missing. The government, banking houses, and infrastructure remained. It seems that the “Confederate States insistence on slavery” had nothing to do with War. War and secession are separate issues. Secession didn’t mean war was inevitable. Most Americans hoped otherwise, even in the South where President Davis insisted that the South simply wanted to be left alone. To think the opposite is to assume the posture of the British in 1776. That is un-American.
There were still six other slave States in the Union as late as April 1861, over a month after Lincoln took office, six slave States that had already rejected secession. Lincoln was not worried about slavery at this point. He supported a proposed thirteenth amendment which would have protected slavery indefinitely in the States where it already existed. He promised never to interfere with the institution in the South. Lincoln’s objective in March 1861 was to “preserve the Union” at all costs, and by “preserving the Union” Lincoln meant preserving the Republican Party and his fledgling administration. Letting the South go would have certainly made him a one term president. He received less than forty percent of the popular vote in 1860.
Applebaum is correct that letting the South go would have ensured the existence of slavery both within the Union and out for the near future (every other power abolished slavery by 1880), but this was not a moral question for most Americans. Lincoln received thunderous applause across the North in 1860 when he made promises to leave the institution alone. Racism was an American institution and Lincoln never challenged the prevailing attitudes on blacks. He embraced them. The Republican Party didn’t dabble in “moral truths.” Their objective was always political. Bottle the South up, ensure that the Whig economic agenda could be ascendant, and control the spoils.
This still doesn’t take away from the tragedy of the War. Contrary to what the “great scholar” Coates had to say—and he has as much claim to being a great scholar as David Barton, which isn’t much—the loss of one million men, the best blood in America, to a war for Union as Lincoln insisted was unnecessary at best and diabolical at worst. The elimination of slavery was for much of the war an afterthought. Lincoln considered it nothing more than a war measure to “best subdue the enemy.”
The simple fact is that Lincoln wanted war. He had the chance to save the Union without war before he took office. He had the chance to save the Union without war in March 1861. He rejected attempts to peacefully purchase federal property and began polling his cabinet about provisioning Sumter less than a week after taking office knowing full well it would cause war. As he later told a political ally, his decision to provision Fort Sumter had the desired outcome, meaning armed conflict. Nothing can sugarcoat Lincoln’s headlong rush into the bloodiest war in American history.
Trump may have been on to something here. Better leadership could have avoided the carnage. But saying that is now considered sacrilege. How closed minded of the “liberal” historical profession and establishment gatekeepers of acceptable truth.
But who cares. No one really reads The Atlantic anymore, anyway.
The Best of Brion McClanahan

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Brion McClanahan [send him mail] holds a Ph.D. in American history from the University of South Carolina and is a faculty member at Tom Woods’s Liberty Classroom. He is the author or co-author of six books, most recently 9 Presidents Who Screwed Up America and Four Who Tried to Save Her (Regnery History, 2016). Find him at http://www.brionmcclanahan.com.

Previous article by Brion McClanahan: The Latest 18th Century Fake News

Angry Reader
May 1, 2017 5:14 pm / Leave a Comment / victorhanson
From an Angry Reader:

Mr. Hanson,

Did you volunteer or were you drafted (like so many of us) to fight in Vietnam? Did you know “we” lost that war to those so called “commies” and now those “commies” make Trump brand shirts and ties?

Also, are you willing to pay for increased US military involvement throughout the world with more tax cuts as the US did in the never ending wars in Afghanistan and Iraq? Cutting spending for meals on wheels, planned parenthood, health insurance benefits for Americans, clean air and water, might not be enough to pay for all your munitions or even meet payroll for a lowly paid non drafted military. At least US tax dollars paid for our napalm in Vietnam. What are you willing to sacrifice in Syria, Iran, Korea, Afghanistan, Iraq, etc. etc. etc. to “make America great again?” Perhaps your own life or limbs again?

Perhaps reading a little more George Santayana might help balance your thirst for blood. And perhaps a “proportionate” bombing of an air base before warning Russia and Assad before time might actually be actually a bit more equal in “proportions” to scare your enemies. And as a veteran and historian try to remember how many bombs, and napalm, and bullets, and killings of the enemy and our own troops it took in that classic military loss. Revenge may be sweet but it doesn’t always go as planned, even for those willing to pay for the effort with massive tax cuts. As a historian, that is one thing you should know by now.

Happy Easter.

Sincerely,

Jimmy Gorman

Chicago Tribune Subscriber

Victor Davis Hanson’s Reply:

Dear Angry Reader Jimmy Gorman,

I registered for the draft the day that I was eligible, and received a lottery number in 1972 at a time when the draft then shortly ended and less than 25,000 Americans were left in Vietnam at year’s end—and when U.S. combat operations on the ground were largely over in Vietnam.

Do you eat food? If so, would you be competent and morally qualified to comment on food policy, given the likelihood that you have never farmed or shared the life of a farmer, and have no first-hand experience with tractor work, peach pruning, or fertilization—or the work of others that brings your food to your table? I also did not live in ancient Greece and therefore should not write about the Peloponnesian War? I cannot adjudicate the success or failure of a past ruptured appendix operation because I am not a surgeon?

We did not lose to North Vietnam, but achieved a settlement that was set up by a peace agreement between the two countries in 1973. The aftermath of Watergate and the serial cut-offs of all U.S. military aid to the South Vietnamese government encouraged North Vietnam to resume the war, and it did so successfully—sort of as if Eisenhower had cut all U.S. aid to South Korea in the election year 1956 and withdrawn U.S. peacekeepers. Do you think South Korea would exist today?

Vietnam is opening its economy, but otherwise it is a Stalinist country; the millions who were jailed, executed, or fled as boat people might not share your rosy scenarios or jest. I opposed the bombing in Libya. I suggested that Obama was foolish to have set a redline in Syria that he never intended to honor and would empower the Assad government to kill even more innocents. I criticized judge/jury/executioner drone assassination missions (which Obama joked about at a White House Correspondence Dinner). Do you read or just rant?

You must know, of course, that current defense spending is near historic postwar lows as a percentage of the budget, and that entitlements and social spending are at record highs. Go back and check the ratios between social expenditures as a percentage of the federal budget versus defense spending in 1950 and then compare those ratios to today’s figures. And you must know that Obama doubled the debt in the largest spending spree in U.S. history, despite raising taxes and earning record revenues. Yet he never achieved 3% economic growth unlike both Bush and Clinton. Do you think those massive outlays since 2009 made the U.S. safer, the inner-city more tranquil, or the “blue wall” rust-belt states more prosperous?

Have you really read George Santayana other than to pull out his tired, one-trick pony quote on learning from history? I suggest you try reading his collected lectures on aesthetics published as The Sense of Beauty and then once you get through them, write how inspired you were about its argument and aims. (Incidentally, the widely quoted “only the dead have seen the end of war,” which is usually and wrongly attributed to Thucydides, was Santayana’s Soliloquies in England).

I was waiting for the leftist ad hominem attack and of course it appeared with the slur “thirst for blood.”

Deterrence keeps the peace; appeasement starts wars and gets people killed. I have written repeatedly that war never goes as anticipated, that it is often more costly than expected, and that those who urge it often bail when it becomes controversial. Had “war monger” Winston Churchill been prime minister in 1936 instead of the appeaser Stanley Baldwin there was a far greater chance that millions would not have subsequently perished as victims of the Third Reich.

The usefulness of military history is in trying to keep the current peace (unless you think oncologists like tumors or seismologists enjoy earthquakes), and in remembering that the tragic lessons from the past are predictable: military readiness in a consensual society deters aggressors and keeps the calm; disarmament or appeasement encourages belligerents to try something stupid.

As a self-described historian of some sort, that is one thing you should know by now.

Happy Post-Easter.

Sincerely,

Vic Hanson

Chicago Tribune syndicated columnist

[As a Viet Nam vet & former Marine, it is interesting to note that N. Vietnamese Gen. Giap, the man who ran the war for Hanoi, wrote a book explaining how and why they won. In it, he explains how everything was lost for the North, until the Democrat Congress bailed them out. The US Military and RVN Military had won the war, and US politicians lost it. That is what Gen. Giap says!]

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The Deification of Lincoln
(and of the American State)

By Thomas DiLorenzo

April 27, 2017
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“The violence of the criticism aimed at Lincoln by the great men of his time on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line is startling. The breadth and depth of the spectacular prejudice against him is often shocking for its cruelty, intensity, and unrelenting vigor. The plain truth is that Mr. Lincoln was deeply reviled by many who knew him personally, and by hundreds of thousands who only knew of him.”

–Larry Tagg, The Unpopular Mr. Lincoln: America’s Most Reviled President

In his book, The Unpopular Mr. Lincoln, historian Larry Tagg, a native of Lincoln, Illinois, constructs a powerful case that Abraham Lincoln was by far the most hated and reviled of all American presidents, North and South, during his lifetime. For example, in May of 1864 the New York Times labeled Lincoln “a perjurer, a usurper, a tyrant, a subverter of the Constitution, a destroyer of the liberties of this country, a reckless desperado, a heartless trifler . . . there is no circle in Dante’s Inferno full enough of torment to expiate his iniquities.”

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The Lacrosse, Wisconsin Democrat newspaper warned in November of 1864 that should Lincoln be reelected, “we hope that a bold hand will be found to plunge the dagger into the tyrant’s heart . . .” Such views were commonplace in the North.

This all changed after Lincoln’s death, as the Republican Party recruited (and probably paid quite handsomely) the New England clergy to capitalize on the assassination for political propaganda purposes. Professor Tagg explains this in a chapter entitled “The Sudden Saint.” After viciously vilifying him for four years as an infidel, and worse, “pastors across America rewrote their Easter sermons” after Lincoln’s death on Good Friday, “to include a new, exalted view of Lincoln as an American Moses, a leader out of slavery, a national savior who was not allowed to cross over into the Promised Land.” The Republican Party, with the help of a highly-politicized clergy, saw that “all their political enemies would fall before the sword that Lincoln’s death had put into their hands” in the post-war world. THE UNPOPULAR MR. LINC… Larry Tagg Best Price: $50.24

Such were the origins of the Lincoln Myth, a much bigger rewriting of history than anything the Soviets or any other totalitarian regime ever attempted, for it has been going on now for more than 150 years. An important part of this story is told in a 1943 book that I recently discovered entitled The Deification of Lincoln by Ira D. Cardiff. It is for sale on Amazon.com, and is also online. It was recently reprinted by the Christopher Publishing House of Boston and is dedicated to “those lovers of truth who are unafraid of special interests, public opinion or popular superstitions.”

The book starts out stating that, by 1943 most Americans were already “not at all interested in the truth about Lincoln” thanks to nearly eighty years of lies, myths, and superstitions about him in thousands of books. “They are not interested, in other words, in the real Lincoln,” wrote Cardiff. “They desire a supernatural Lincoln, a Lincoln with none of the faults or frailties of the common man, a Lincoln who is a savior, leading us to democracy and liberty – though most of said readers are not interested in democracy or liberty . . .” Moreover, “a biography of Lincoln which told the truth about him would probably have great difficulty in finding a publisher.” That was nearly seventy-five years ago.

Nearly three quarters of a century before Larry Tagg’s book was published, Ira Cardiff wrote of the widespread hatred and revulsion of Lincoln by Northerners, especially the Northern clergy, and how that all changed after his death for purely political reasons, based on an ever-growing mountain of lies. Cardiff focuses on perhaps the biggest lie told by the hyper-political New England clergy, the zealots who instigated the war in the name of eradicating America – and then the world – of sin in order to create a Kingdom of God on Earth that would pave the way for the Second Coming of Christ. That is what motivated the “abolitionist” movement much more than concern for the slaves. (See Murray Rothbard’s essay, “Just War”). The Deification of Lin… Ira D. Cardiff Best Price: $15.57 Buy New $9.57

All of a sudden, the atheist Abraham Lincoln was portrayed by the lying New England clergy, in cahoots with the Republican Party, as the holiest and most saintly man in America, if not on the entire planet. His father, who he hated so much that he did not attend his funeral, suddenly was said to have possessed “sterling mental and moral qualities.” Lincoln the atheist was said to have spent most of his time on his knees in prayer in the White House. “His mother became second only to the Virgin Mary in her chastity.”

“Thousands of sermons were preached to prove him devoutly religious . . “ There was of course never any evidence or proof of any of this. In fact, there is voluminous evidence that exactly the opposite was true, as Cardiff explains in great detail. The first biographies of Lincoln, of which there are now over ten thousand, were filled with statements like “He [Lincoln] believed in his inmost soul that he was an instrument in the hands of God for the accomplishment of a great purpose.” It is of course absurd to assert that you know what is in a man’s “innermost soul.” Yours truly has found that contemporary Lincoln biographies are polluted with similarly silly statements about what was supposedly in Lincoln’s heart, his soul, his mind, etc. Bill O’Reilly’s Killing Lincoln is especially ridiculous in this regard. There are statements on nearly every page about what was “in his mind” or “in his heart.”

Another hallmark of contemporary Lincoln “scholarship” is the repetition of statements just like this one from one of the very first Lincoln biographies: “He was in the White House as God’s instrument.” The assumption here is that the biographer knows what is in the mind of God. Such nonsense set the template for almost all future Lincoln biographies, with very few exceptions.

Cardiff devoted much of his book citing primary sources describing how atheistic and anti-religious the “saintly” Lincoln really was. For example, “previous to his nomination for the presidency, he was roundly condemned by the clergy as an infidel, while after his martyrdom, the same clerics were loud in the claim of his piety (emphasis added).” Larry Tagg says the exact same thing. Killing Lincoln: The S… Bill O’Reilly, Martin … Best Price: $0.82 Buy New $6.97

When Lincoln was a candidate for president, Cardiff points out, only three of the twenty-three ministers in Springfield, Illinois supported him. Moreover, early biographers who actually knew Lincoln had a very different take on his views on religion than writers who never had any personal contact with him, or anyone else who did. Colonel Ward Lamon, a close friend and confidant of Lincoln’s, wrote a biography in which he called Lincoln “an infidel.” His personal White House secretary, John G. Nicolay, wrote that “Mr. Lincoln did not, to my knowledge, in any way, change his religious ideas, opinions of beliefs from the time he left Springfield till the day of his death.” Those “religious ideas” were the ideas of a non-believer. Nicolay made this comment to counter the absurd lie pedaled by the Republican Party, the New England clergy, and court historians after the war that Lincoln experienced some kind of religious conversion late in life. This lie is still repeated to this day in myriad Lincoln biographies.

Judge David Davis, who managed Lincoln’s presidential campaign and who was subsequently appointed to the Supreme Court, wrote that Lincoln “had no faith, in the Christian sense of the term . . .” Lincoln’s wife, Mary Todd, said that “Mr. Lincoln had no hope, and no faith, in the usual acceptation of those words.”

All of this is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to The Lincoln Myth, as I discuss in The Real Lincoln and Lincoln Unmasked. Mountains of lies, myths and superstitions envelope almost every fact of Lincoln’s life, thanks to generations of “Lincoln scholars.” To be a card-carrying “Lincoln scholar” one must demonstrate the ability to come up with at least a half dozen excuses or rationales for every tyrannical or immoral act or words of Lincoln’s. His lifelong racist, white-supremacist speeches were not his sincere beliefs but a ploy to win over white racist voters, we are told. He objected “to making voters or jurors of Negroes,” he said in a Lincoln-Douglas debate, so that Negroes could eventually become voters and jurors, Harry Jaffa informed us in his last book on “Father Abraham.” He proposed the The Real Lincoln: A Ne… Thomas DiLorenzo Best Price: $2.91 Buy New $7.62 enshrinement of slavery explicitly into the Constitution with the Corwin Amendment, Doris Kearns-Goodwin informs us, to “save the Republican Party” so that it could, someday, maybe in fifty years, end slavery. When he advocated the deportation or “colonization” of black people, “this is how honest people lie,” Gabor Boritt tells us. And on and on. As Cardiff wrote: “The unfortunate and defenseless public . . . is almost powerless to protect itself from Lincoln hysteria. If it attempts to get the truth about Lincoln, it is confronted with a mountain of fable and froth, foolishness and fancy . . . . Of the thousands of books published on Lincoln [as of 1943], one can almost count on his fingers those of any value as critical, scientific productions.”

Cardiff believed that the U.S. could have ended slavery peacefully, as all the rest of the world did in the nineteenth century (including the British, French, Dutch, Danes, Swedes, Spaniards, the northern states in the U.S.). That would have taken a real statesman, however, and not a small-time Illinois railroad lobbyist who once stated his life’s aspiration as being the political party boss of Illinois. Without the war, wrote Cardiff:

“[T]here would have been saved several million valuable lives and several billions of money . . . . But the secondary effects [of the war] were even more disastrous . . . . the enmity and sectional hatred which arose, the political oligarchy of ex soldiers with their disgusting pension raids upon the public treasury and a monopoly by them of political offices, a false and distorted idea of patriotism, the retardation to the material development of the South, the racial hatred between southern whites and blacks greatly exaggerated . . .”

To all of this “is now added the debasing moral effect of presenting to the innocent youth of the land the account of a prominent national character of this period in an utterly false light.” Even worse, as Clyde Wilson once remarked, is the fact that the deification of Lincoln led to the deification of the presidency in general, and then eventually to the entire government.

Robert Penn Warren wrote about this phenomenon in his book, The Legacy of the Civil War, in which he explains how the Lincoln myth – The Legacy of the Civi… Robert Penn Warren Best Price: $3.48 Buy New $9.64 and myriad other myths about the war in general – were used by the Republican Party to create The Mother of All Political Myths – that thanks to Lincoln, the U.S. government had acquired a “treasury of virtue.” This meant that anything the government did from then on – genocide against the Plains Indians, murdering hundreds of thousands of Filipinos, the imperialistic Spanish-American War, entering World War I, dropping atomic bombs on Japan, etc., was virtuous, by definition, because it was the U.S. government that was doing it.

The founding fathers never argued that Americans were so morally exceptional that they therefore had a right to become the bullies of the world and attempt to remake the entire planet in their image. That is the Lincoln legacy. Actually, the idea emanates from the New England “yankees” and their Mid-Western compatriots like Lincoln. See Clyde Wilson’s “The Yankee Problem in America.” Lincoln’s own political rhetoric, which has been faithfully repeated by generations of court historians, is what the late Professor Mel Bradford called “the rhetoric of continuing revolution.” Others call it the rhetoric of “American exceptionalism.”

The Latest Skullduggery: Too Much Even for the Gods
April 7, 2017 6:26 am / Leave a Comment / victorhanson

The Corner: The one and only.

By Victor Davis Hanson// National Review

The latest disclosures that former Obama national-security adviser Susan Rice may have requested that intelligence agencies reveal or “unmask” those from the Trump team who were surveilled in purportedly normal intelligence gathering — and that such requests may have extended over an apparently considerable period of time — remind us that at some point there is always an accounting.

Rice’s past serial and shameless untruths about the tragic deaths at Benghazi (a 2012 Obama re-election “al-Qaeda on the run” narrative, with a supposedly spontaneous riot over a YouTube video as the cause of the attack) were contextualized by the media and eventually vaporized. Her sad “honor and distinction” narrative about the Bowe Bergdahl betrayal of his comrades — the infamous purported “prisoner of war” “captured on the battlefield” fabrication — was intended to mask what was otherwise a dishonest and terrible hostage swap for someone who had endangered the lives of his fellow soldiers. Recently, she has denied all knowledge of what House Intelligence chairman Devin Nunes had been fighting to uncover, and has even tweeted periodically to criticize the purported ethical lapses and unprofessionalism of the Trump administration.

All that is a lot for even the gods to grind. If, as likely, she had access to, or requested, such raw data, and sent it, with names illegally unmasked, to primary players of the Obama administration (e.g., Clapper, Brennan, Rhodes, etc.), that fact would blow up some heretofore denials of any knowledge of such skullduggery and perhaps become the greatest presidential scandal of the last half century.

The Rice revelation might also put into the proper landscape the following: a) the astounding self-confessionals of Hillary adviser Evelyn Farkas about her frantic efforts to convince Obama operatives to increase intelligence gathering and to leak the information to the press (what gave a former mid-level Department of Defense employee the presumption that she could influence the intelligence operations of the U.S. government?), b) the unprecedented eleventh-hour Obama effort to broaden access to classified data to spread and leak such unmasked individuals, c) the political and media landmines that Representative Nunes (facing “kill the messenger” efforts to kill the message) had to navigate around and the character assassination to which he has been subjected, d) why the Russian-collusion narrative, denied by intelligence chiefs, has become the necessary distraction — first, to steer attention away from the improper leaking and surveillance, and, second, to be used to offer pseudo-moral equivalence to stop further investigation: as if Russian collusion is the bookend to unmasking Trump; as if Nunes is the mirror-image of Representative Adam Schiff, to achieve an impasse of “so let’s just call it even and quit the entire mess and ‘move on.’” e) the relative silence of former president and “constitutional law professor” Barack Obama.

What will be most interesting will be two corollary inquiries: 1) We need to know when, why, and how the White House put such unmasked data illegally into the hands of the New York Times, Washington Post, BBC, etc. perhaps initially to smear the Trump campaign (will the same reporters who ran with the “Trump frolicking in Moscow” collusion narratives now reboot and run with the true story?), and later the Trump transition and presidency; and 2) were these unmasked individuals really incidentally picked up data from surveilled foreigners — or, in fact, were they the primary targets of monitoring all along, with supposedly preplanned surveillance of foreign operators acting as cover?

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/446417/susan-rice-unmasking-trump-associates-allegations

Journey to the Center of the Country
April 5, 2017 3:00 pm / Leave a Comment / victorhanson
By Victor Davis Hanson// National Review

Trump seems radical only to the radicals who aim to take America far, far left.

There have been roughly two sorts of Democratic presidents over the last century. A few were revolutionaries who sought to take the country leftward with them. They were masters of “never letting a serious crisis go to waste” transformations and came to power after the chaos of national crises and near collapse.

Franklin Roosevelt created the modern notion of intrusive, redistributive government during the panic of the Depression. Lyndon Johnson, following the trauma of the John F. Kennedy assassination, pushed through the Great Society, which institutionalized the idea that it was the duty of government to use its power and money to seek an equality of result among the citizenry.

Barack Obama, following the economic crisis of 2008, sought to implant “lead from behind” foreign policy and an update of the Great Society, and to “fundamentally transform” the country, usually by focusing on identity politics as the core of the culture (in which the color of our skin rather than the content of our character would brand us for who we are).

In contrast, Democratic presidents such as Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy, Jimmy Carter, and Bill Clinton acted more as caretakers. They more or less administered what they had inherited but lacked the ideological fervor (or perhaps the political savvy or desire) to take the state further leftward.

The immediate Republican antidotes to Democratic revolutionaries were rarely themselves counter-revolutionaries. Dwight Eisenhower modestly tried to pull the country back to the center after 20 years of the New Deal — but nonetheless was hounded unmercifully for trying to do so. The supposedly dark and evil Richard Nixon instituted wage and price controls, created the EPA, and went to China. He did not dismantle the Great Society.

A true conservative revolutionary has been rare — Goldwater failed to get elected, and Reagan, without both houses of Congress, ended up more moderate than he expected and was followed in office by a Republican centrist.

Nonetheless, the media and the Left, in their respective arenas, howled that these modest corrections back to the center by Eisenhower, Nixon, and now Trump were nihilistic and extreme.

True to form, we are now hearing those same end-of-days accusations — even as Trump seeks to bring the U.S. back to about where it was between 1980 and 1992. Note that this endless cycle of change and counter-change is not a static phenomenon but incrementally (and over time radically) takes government and the culture ever more leftward.

So far, Trump has adopted the old Bill Clinton approach to illegal immigration, a formerly centrist but now strangely unorthodox position: He favors law enforcement rather than politically inspired amnesties calibrated to give him electoral and demographic political advantage.

His appeals to the white working classes are right out of the Clinton-Gore appeals in 1992, and they’re a rehash of Reagan’s courting of Democrats.

Hillary Clinton pandered more to working-class whites in 2008 than Trump did in 2016. The latter never said something akin to Hillary’s overt boasts about her white support in the 2008 primaries. “I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on,” she told USA Today, adding that an AP story “found how Senator Obama’s support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in [Indiana and North Carolina] who had not completed college were supporting me.”

Trump seeks to finish the border wall that was authorized and started by others. And he is called nativist, racist, and worse, largely because between 2009 and 2016 what was extreme was presented not just as the new normal but as the new foundation of something even more radical to come. Trump’s proposed modest cuts in discretionary spending — less than 2 percent of a quarter of the budget — will hardly affect the deficit or the $20 trillion national debt. Nonetheless, Democrats will condemn him as a modern-day Scrooge.

On energy, Trump again is simply trying to finish the Keystone and Dakota pipelines that were authorized by others. His approach to coal is standard 1990s boilerplate Democratic politics. Sarah Palin’s 2008 mantra of “drill, baby, drill” was smugly written off by then-candidate Obama as Neanderthalism. In fact, she not only proved prescient; she also outlined the eventual energy protocols that saved the Obama presidency. When all of Obama’s efforts failed to achieve 3 percent economic growth, what he opposed — fracking and horizontal drilling — prevented a weak economy from completely tanking.

Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch is mild-mannered and superbly qualified, and by design he avoids polarization. Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor had far greater records of unapologetic political activism.

Trump’s vision of the EPA, of regulations in general, and of taxes take us back to what was also normal in the George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton eras. They seem revolutionary — again only because Obama used executive-branch regulations along with the courts as a means to implement radical agendas that otherwise lacked both public and congressional support.

If Trump’s tax reform is successful, the top brackets won’t be that much different from what they were under George W. Bush.

The furor over Trump’s efforts to reform Obamacare (rather than repeal it and start over) largely grew out of the assumption formed over the last eight years that it was the duty of the federal government to demand that everyone have one standard brand of health insurance, regardless of individual circumstance and preferences. If Trump ever reforms health care, it will probably be a return to the old system prior to Obama, with some state subsidies for the indigent to buy their own private health-care plans and with a few protections about preexisting conditions and young adults being able to stay on their parents’ plans until age 26. These are radical ideas only to radicals who had envisioned Obamacare as the final step to a one-payer system like Britain’s National Health Service.

So far, the Left has not said much about Trump’s foreign policy, to the extent its shape can be discerned in the administration’s first 100 days. But again, what is emerging is something that is neither neoconservative nation-building nor “lead from behind” Obama-era recessionals.

Practically, it looks to be an unleashing of the restrictions on American power against ISIS, but no intention of occupying and rebuilding Syria; a Jacksonian determination to deter Iran and North Korea, but no desire to implement regime change by force in either country; and a return to the status quo of old friends and enemies after the Obama-era recalibration of American interests (Israel and the Gulf States are once again friends, Iran most certainly is not). Putin is Putin — to be quietly deterred rather than loudly, gratuitously romanced or alienated. He is neither worthy of attempting another reset along the lines of Obama’s open-mic promises of “flexibility,” nor is he the existential demon who robbed them of a third term of the Obama presidency, as the Democrats have suddenly decided.

Trump’s foreign-policy team has few hard-core politicos like Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, Samantha Power, Susan Rice, or Ben Rhodes.

James Mattis, Rex Tillerson, and H. R. McMaster may or may not have voted for Trump; they are Jacksonians, certainly not international utopians, ideologues, and globalists. They have never been elected to anything. Mostly, the trio wishes to protect American interests abroad, and they agree that U.S. interests come first. In other words, in them, we have something in between George Marshall and John Foster Dulles at the helm, rather than Cyrus Vance and John Kerry.

If Trump so far has tried to push the country back to the center after the last eight years of Obama’s efforts to “fundamentally transform” the country, why the hysteria?

Three obvious reasons come to mind.

1) Some in the media and the liberal community are mimicking Trump’s own “Art of the Deal” methodology. They know that Trump’s agenda so far is pretty much centrist by their own standards, but they believe that by exaggerating and demonizing it as nearly a John Bircher project, Trump will back off — and therefore end up to the left-center rather than in the center or right of center. If Trump is smeared now as 90 percent demonic, they can later negotiate downward for a 55 percent demonic president and consider it a smashing victory.

2) Other hysterical leftists are still furious, as much at themselves as at Trump. In the 2016 election, they had everything imaginable going for them: the Clinton brand name, the country’s Big Money from Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and Hollywood, Republican civil war and Never Trump insurrections, a captive and toady media, an abandonment of Trump by conservative megaphones, veritable collusion between the press and the Obama campaign, popular culture, the foreign press, and the European bureaucracy — and they blew it.

To admit that they imploded because Hillary Clinton was a shrill and unimaginative candidate, that the campaign was both horribly and arrogantly run, and that the proverbial “people’s party” was not seen as populist by millions of Americans in the key swing states is still impossible. In contrast, Trump as the beneficiary of Russian collusion and as a veritable Hitlerian Gruppenführer offers leftists the psychological atonement they require to recover from their self-inflicted disasters.

3) Finally, Trump the person, not the particulars of his agenda, drives the Left crazy. It is not just that he can be crude, blunt, and uncouth, but that by doing so he delights the half of the country that is sickened by supposedly elegant political correctness.

If Trump’s political agendas so far are correctives of Obama radicalism, his cultural and rhetorical agendas — Americans first, nationalism in lieu of globalization, economic and military rather than soft power, confident American ascendance rather than slow and comfortable adjustment to decline, the melting pot over the salad bowl — represent to the Democrats heretical apostasies from the entire politically correct national faith.

We know from the history of American politics that zealots more often are provoked by words than deeds, and react more to symbols than to statistics.

What to expect in this new civil war?

Trumpism, to the extent it can be defined, will be deemed successful and even iconic if it achieves a GDP growth of 3 percent or above.

If not, then expect the present hysteria over the journey back to the center to grow.
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/446384/trump-centrist-moderate-course-correction-after-obama-era-radicalism

03/29/17
From an Angry Reader:

Do you mean educated people who worked hard to better themselves? Let’s all just stay in the old steel mill towns and coal mining towns gripping about how unfair the world is to us. You know, the good old days when blacks knew their place and we didn’t have no Mexicans around. You are right I guess they were ready for a Trump and the left was unprepared but it does not make them correct. Carol Hoyt, Big Lake Ak. And Las Vegas Nv.
Victor Davis Hanson’s Reply:

Dear Angry Reader Carol Hoyt,

How you managed to cram such a stream of confusion into just four sentences is in a way impressive.

Sentence one: I did not conflate elites with educated people, but rather with a subset of urban, powerful people in politics, academia, the media, and entertainment who exercise influence and power without any discernible display of competence. These are not neurosurgeons or engineers but the architects of $20 trillion in debt, stereotyped and dull Hollywood movies, and inaccurate and undependable news accounts of the Dan Rather/Brian Williams sort.

Sentence two: Those who voted for Trump were not just people “in the old steel mill towns and coal mining towns” but half the country that felt the progressive project under Obama had bankrupted the treasury, left the world in a terrible state abroad, divided the nation along racial lines, and stalled the economy (first in over 80 years not to achieve 3% economic growth) in a way not seen since the Hoover administration. Incidentally, I’ve been to Appalachia and steel mill towns and discovered that those who have been the losers of globalization complain a lot less about their tragedies than do the winners of globalization their psychodramas and neuroses.

Sentence three: On no evidence you equate the working classes with racism. Is the sarcastic “we didn’t have no Mexicans around” an attempt to mimic what you think is the patois of the poor white working classes? You are no more effective in envisioning how the supposed poor speak than was an equally condescending Hillary Clinton in all her myriad fake accents and mannerisms.

Sentence four: My column was a political observation of why Trump, against all odds and predictions, won, and why such a victory might have been anticipated had anyone turned off pundits and ignored conventional wisdom.

Whether “they” are correct (I take it you mean the white working classes who abandoned the Democratic Party for Trump), depends entirely on Trump, not what I or you say. If he achieves 3% economic growth, reforms the tax code and regulations, address the ACA, ups the labor non-participation rate, then, yes, his supporters were “correct”; if he doesn’t do any of that, then they were either misled or asked the impossible. We shall soon find out.

Victor Hanson, Huntington Lake, Ca. And Stanford, Ca.

The Russian Farce
March 28, 2017 11:36 am / Leave a Comment / victorhanson

by Victor Davis Hanson// National Review

Remember when Obama and Hillary cozied up to Putin? And recall when the media rejoiced at surveillance leaks about Team Trump?

The American Left used to lecture the nation about its supposedly paranoid suspicions of Russia. The World War II alliance with Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union had led many leftists to envision a continuing post-war friendship with Russia.

During the subsequent Cold War, American liberals felt that the Right had unnecessarily become paranoid about Soviet Russia, logically culminating in the career of the demagogic Senator Joe McCarthy. Later, in movies such as Seven Days in May, Doctor Strangelove, and The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming, Hollywood focused on American neuroses as much as Russian hostility for strained relations.

In the great chess rivalry of 1972 known as “The Match of the Century,” American liberals favored Russian grandmaster Boris Spassky over fellow countryman Bobby Fischer, who embarrassed them by winning.

In the same manner, Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev was often portrayed in the media as the urbane, suave, and reasonable conciliator, while President Ronald Reagan was depicted as the uncouth disrupter of what could have been improved Russian–American relations.

Senator Ted Kennedy reportedly reached out to Soviet leader Yuri Andropov in 1984 to gain his help in denying Reagan his reelection.

In sum, the American Left always felt that Russia was unduly demonized by the American Right and was a natural friend, if not potential ally, of the United States. That tradition no doubt influenced the decision of the incoming Obama administration to immediately reach out to Vladimir Putin’s Russia, despite is recent aggressions in Georgia and steady crackdown on internal dissent, and despite Russia’s estrangement from the prior Bush administration.

Obama’s Entreaty to the Russians

In March 2012, in a meeting with President Dimitri Medvedev of Russia, President Barack Obama thought his microphone was either off or could not pick up the eerie assurances that he gave the Russian president:

“On all these issues, but particularly missile defense, this, this can be solved, but it’s important for him [Vladimir Putin] to give me space.”

Medvedev answered: “Yeah, I understand. I understand your message about space. Space for you . . . ”

Obama agreed and elaborated, “This is my last election. After my election, I have more flexibility.”

Medvedev finished the hot-mic conversation with, “I understand. I will transmit this information to Vladimir, and I stand with you.”

A fair interpretation of this stealthy conversation would run as follows:

Barack Obama naturally wanted to continue a fourth year of his reset and outreach to Vladimir Putin, the same way that he was reaching out to other former American enemies such as the Iranians and the Cubans. Yet Obama was uneasy that his opponent, Mitt Romney, might attack him during his reelection campaign as an appeaser of Putin. Thus, to preempt any such attack, Obama might be forced to appear less flexible (offer less “space”) toward Putin than he otherwise would be in a non-election year. In other words, he couldn’t publicly assure Putin that he would be “flexible” about implementing missile defense in Eastern Europe (“all these issues”) until after he was reelected.

An apprehensive Obama, in his hot-mic moment, was signaling that after his anticipated victory, he would revert to his earlier reset with Putin. And most significantly, Obama wished Putin to appreciate in advance the motives for Obama’s campaign-year behavior. Or he at least hoped that Putin would not embarrass him by making international moves that would reflect poorly on Obama’s reset policy.

Furthermore, Obama did not want his implicit quid pro quo proposal to become part of the public record. Had it been public, it might have been interpreted as a message to Putin that he should empathize with Obama’s plight — and that he should interfere with the American election by behaving in a way that would empower Obama’s candidacy rather than detract from it.

In the present hysterical climate, substitute the name Trump for Obama, and we would be hearing Democratic demands for impeachment on grounds that Trump was caught secretly whispering to the Russians about compromising vital national-security issues in a quid pro quo meant to affect the outcome of the 2012 election.

The Architects of Russian Outreach

The Obama administration came up with a reset–soft-glove approach to Vladimir’s Russia, characterized by Secretary Hillary Clinton’s heralded pushing of the red plastic button on March 6, 2009, in Geneva. Reset was couched in overt criticism of George W. Bush, who had supposedly alienated Putin by reacting too harshly (like a typical cowboy) to Russia’s aggression in Georgia.

Over the next few years, the reset policy consisted of, among other things, backtracking on previously agreed-on missile-defense plans in Eastern Europe. In the second presidential debate of 2012, Obama portrayed Romney as being too tough on Russia, to the point of delusion:

A few months ago when you were asked what’s the biggest geopolitical threat facing America, you said Russia, not al-Qaeda. You said Russia. In the 1980s, they’re now calling to ask for their foreign policy back because, you know, the Cold War’s been over for 20 years.

The Obama administration invited Russia into the Middle East for the first time in nearly a half-century to help Obama back off from his own redline threats to attack Syria if evidence of WMD usage appeared. Moreover, after the Crimea and eastern Ukraine aggressions, the perception in most of the Western world was that the U.S. was not sufficiently tough with Putin, largely because of its commitment to a prior (though failed) outreach.

So what ended this one-sided reset in 2016?

The estrangement certainly did not coincide entirely with Putin’s aggressions on Russia’s borders. Nor were Democrats inordinately angry with Putin when he bombed non-al-Qaeda Syrian resistance fighters.

Rather, Democrats’ split with Putin grew from the perception that hackers had easily entered the porous e-mail account of Hillary Clinton’s campaign guru John Podesta and released his messages to WikiLeaks. This led to general embarrassment for Hillary and the Democrats — and they floated the theory that WikiLeaks and Julian Assange were taking orders from Putin or at least operating with the encouragement of the Kremlin’s intelligence services.

Hating Hillary?

After the WikiLeaks mess, the image of Putin was reset again, and now he was said to have ordered the hacking because he hated Hillary Clinton and indeed the Obama administration in general.

That was a bizarre indictment. If Putin were really a conniving realist, he would have much preferred Hillary in the 2016 election — given his success in manipulating the Obama-era reset.

Unlike Trump, Clinton would probably have kept the radical Obama defense cuts and perpetuated the restrictions on domestic energy development that were helping Russia. She probably would have likewise continued Obama’s therapeutic approach to foreign policy.

From Russia’s point of view, considering their strategic and economic interests, a pliable Obama 2.0 would have been far better than Trump, with his pro-oil-and-gas domestic agenda, his promised defense buildup, and his unpredictable Jacksonian promises to help friends and hurt enemies.

Squaring the Surveillance Circle

The entire Trump-collusion-with-Russia narrative has now descended into incoherence.

For five months, dating back to the heated final stretch of the 2016 election, mainstream media — in particular Obama-administration pet reporters at the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the BBC — ran creepy and occasionally near-obscene stories about “collusion” between the Trump campaign and the Russians. These published rumors were based on “unnamed sources” often identified generically as American intelligence officers inside the FBI, CIA, and NSA.

Soon that narrative went from ominous to hysterical — but only once Hillary inexplicably lost the election. The anonymous allegations of collusion were used to convict the Trump circle of a veritable pre-election partnership with the Russians. The collusion was to be followed, the story went, with a new reset with Putin — this time born not out of naïveté but of lucre and near treason.

We forget that the Democrats’ narratives of the purported Trump collusion also radically changed to meet changing circumstances.

Before the election, a sure and poor-loser Trump was pathetically cheating with the Russians to stop the fated winner Clinton.

Then, in the post-election shock and transition, the Russian-interference storyline was repackaged as an excuse for the poorly conducted Clinton campaign that had blown a supposedly big lead and sure victory. “The Russians did it” was preferable to blaming Hillary for not visiting Wisconsin once.

Finally, Trump’s Russian connection served as a useful tool to delegitimize an abhorrent incoming Trump administration. And the delegitimizing was made easier by Obama’s eleventh-hour order, days before his departure, to expand the list of federal officials who would have access to sensitive intelligence and surveillance transcripts.

But all such accusations of Trump-Russian complicity, based on admitted leaks from intelligence agencies, required some sort of hard evidence: leaked transcripts of Trump officials clearly outlining shared strategies with the Russians, hard proof of Russian electronic tampering in key swing states, doctored e-mails planted in the Podesta WikiLeaks trove, travel records of Trump people in clandestine meetings with Russian counterparts, or bank records showing cash payoffs.

Yet a hostile media, in collusion with intelligence-agency leakers, has so far provided no such proof. John Podesta had as much invested in Russian profiteering as did former Trump aides. Bill Clinton and the Clinton Foundation had as many financial dealings with pro-Russian interests as did Trump people. The ubiquitous Russian ambassador had met as many Democratic grandees as he had Trump associates.

The lack so far of hard proof gradually created a boomerang effect. Attention turned away from what “unnamed sources” had alleged to the question of how unnamed sources had gathered surveillance of the Trump people in the first place — as evidenced by media reports of General Flynn’s conversations, of Trump’s private talks with foreign leaders, and of allegations of electronic contact between Russian and Trump Tower computers.

In other words, the media and their sources had gambled that congressional overseers, law enforcement, and the public would all overlook surveillance that may have been illegal or only partly legal, and they would also overlook the clearly illegal leaking of such classified information on a candidate and a president-elect — if it all resulted in a scandal of the magnitude of the Pentagon Papers or Watergate.

So far such a scandal has not emerged. But Trump’s opponents continue to push the Russian narrative not because it is believable but because it exhausts and obfuscates likely illegal surveillance and leaking.

The real scandal is probably not going to be Trump’s contacts with Russians. More likely, it will be the rogue work of a politically driven group of intelligence officers, embedded within the bureaucracy, who, either in freelancing mode, or in Henry II–Thomas Becket fashion (“Who will rid me of this meddlesome priest?”) with Obama-administration officials, began monitoring Team Trump — either directly or more likely through the excuse of inadvertently chancing upon conversations while monitoring supposedly suspicious foreign communications.

Added to this mess is the role of three unsympathetic characters who are on record as either not telling the truth, deliberately obfuscating it, or showing terrible judgement.

Obama CIA director John Brennan, who assumed that role after the still mysterious and abrupt post-election departure of David Petraeus, has a long history of political gymnastics; he has made many a necessary career readjustment to changing Washington politics. He is on record as being deceptive — he failed to reveal that the CIA intercepted Senate communications. He also stated falsely that the drone program had not resulted in a single collateral death. And, in the spirit of Obama’s new Islamic outreach, Brennan strangely suggested that jihad was a sort of personal odyssey rather than a call to use force in spreading Islamic influence. Brennan is also on record as critical of Trump: Trump “should be ashamed of himself,” Brennan said the day after the inauguration, in response to Trump’s speech to CIA staffers gathered in front of the Memorial Wall of Agency heroes.

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper has in the past lied to Congress, when he assured that the NSA did not monitor the communications of American citizens. Likewise, he bizarrely asserted that the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt was largely a secular organization. And more than 50 CENTCOM officers formally accused Clapper of distorting their reports about the Islamic State. Like Brennan, Clapper has been critical of Trump, asking, “Who benefits from a president-elect trashing the intelligence community?”

During the 2016 election, FBI Director James Comey popped up to assure the nation that while Hillary Clinton had conducted herself unethically, and probably in violation of federal statutes in using her private e-mail server for government business and wiping away correspondence, her transgressions did not rise to the level of indictable offenses. It was as if the investigator Comey, rather than the appropriate federal attorney, was adjudicating the decision to charge a suspect.

Then in the final stretch of the race, Comey resurfaced to assert that “new” evidence had led him to reconsider his exculpation of Clinton. And then, on November 6, 2016, just hours before the nation went to the polls, he appeared a third time in front of cameras to reiterate his original judgment that Hillary’s transgressions did not merit further investigation, much less criminal prosecutions. The media contextualized Comey’s schizophrenia as see-saw reactions either to liberal Obama-administration pressures or to near revolts among the more conservative FBI rank-and-file. Just as likely was Comey’s own neurotic itch to seek public attention and to position himself favorably with a likely new president.

Comey’s weird election-era prominence was also apparently fueled by the fact that Attorney General Loretta Lynch was caught in an embarrassing private meeting on the tarmac with Bill Clinton — a meeting during the investigation of his spouse. (The encounter was intended to remain secret, but a local reporter was tipped off.) That unethical encounter had tainted Lynch’s pose of disinterested adjudication, and she accordingly de facto fobbed off her prosecutorial responsibilities to Comey. Comey most lately has asked the Justice Department to refute Trump’s claims that he was subject to electronic surveillance by the government during the last days of the Obama administration.

Given the past assertions and political natures of Brennan, Clapper, and Comey, none are very credible in any future testimony they might give about the Trump-Russia narrative or the role U.S. intelligence agencies played in the possibly illegal monitoring of Trump associates. All three men are even less credible when it comes to the illegal leaking of such classified information to media outlets.

Trump’s infamous and clumsy tweet (“just found out that Obama had my ‘wires tapped’ in Trump Tower”) may well prove to be inaccurate — literally. But it could also end up being prescient if revelations show that Obama-appointed officials or their underlings used surveillance on foreign officials — three years after the NSA got caught tapping Angela Merkel’s cellphone — in order to sweep up Trump communications and then leak them to the media to damage his candidacy and later his transition.

We are left in the end with paradoxes:

How did Obama’s naïve pro-Putin reset and Clinton-family profiteering transmogrify into wild accusations that others had become even friendlier to such an unsavory character?

How did the image of a sacrosanct media speaking the “truth” of Trump’s collusion with Putin rest on the peddling of false narratives — many of them based on likely illegal surveillance and certainly unethical and unlawful dissemination?

And if Trump was unhinged for leveling wild allegations based on mainstream news reports, why were news outlets themselves — and those who quoted them chapter and verse — not unhinged for spreading such suddenly unreliable information?

What is the explanatory sword that cuts this Gordian knot?

Trump supposedly had zero chance of winning. But when he did, facts had to adjust to a bitter actuality — at first perhaps to explain away reality, but quite soon after to alter it by any means necessary.http://www.nationalreview.com/article/446148/russian-farce-trump-collusion-hysteria-diverts-attention-surveillance-scandal

http://www.topbuzzapp.com/article/i6260659452401566212?app_id=1106