"They like to focus on the gossip, not the substance!"

"The media wants to bash and focus on negativity."

"How high up the chain of command did this go?"

"Nobody is asking whether Barack Obama and Joe Biden signed off on the spying of their political opponents."

"Donald Trump had to be impeached not because of anything he had done or had failed to do but because of who he was, what he represented: an existential threat to string-pullers of our one-and-a-half-party system."

Roger Kimball writes in American Greatness,

...The point is that Donald Trump had to be impeached not because of anything he had done or had failed to do but because of who he was, what he represented: an existential threat to string-pullers of our one-and-a-half-party system. That is why the Democrats can ride roughshod over the rule of law, to say nothing of precedent and tradition, ruining who knows how many lives, tying up the business of government with preposterous special counsel investigations, House hearings, and the like, while the Republicans mostly vibrate in impotent fury and they emerge from the turmoil scot-free.

Again, there are some signs of fissures in this decades-on Democratic dispensation. The pugilistic response of the president himself is one such sign (“Cet animal est très méchant: quand on l’attaque il se défend”—“This animal is very mean: it defends itself when attacked”). Another sign of change is the stalwartness of Mitch McConnell and the doggedness of U.S. Attorney John Durham and his boss, Attorney General William Barr. My own guess is that we’ll know real progress has been made when—or rather if—a raft of indictments are handed down in the business of the deep-state effort to take down the Trump campaign and then his presidency.

It might never happen. It would, as far as I know, be the first time that the regime party was truly held to account. I am assured by many smart people that this will not happen. They may well be right. If they are, then Trump’s presidency—even if he manages a second term (which at this point I think likely)—will count mostly as an anomaly, a strange challenge to the nomenklatura that they tried to prevent, and then to destroy, but ended up simply waiting out.

Read more here.

Try living with 2010 technology for a day!

In the Wall Street Journal, Joanna Stern writes,

First, the Smartphone Changed. Then, Over a Decade, It Changed Us.
Try living with 2010 technology for a day. Then you’ll see what a difference 10 years can make.

Read more here.

Biggest news stories of the decade

The Wall Street Journal reports on the biggest stories of the decade, beginning with 2010 and ending now here.

Move over, Santa. Kids are ordering directly from Alexa!

Have you been getting lots of boxes from Amazon? Julie Jargon reports here that Alexa might be the new Santa!

Fulani killing Christians in Nigeria

Bernard-Henri Lévy writes in the Wall Street Journal,

Lagos, Nigeria

A slow-motion war is underway in Africa’s most populous country. It’s a massacre of Christians, massive in scale and horrific in brutality. And the world has hardly noticed.

Among them is a violent element. “They are Islamic extremists of a new stripe,” the NGO director said, “more or less linked with Boko Haram,” the sect that became infamous for the 2014 kidnapping of 276 Christian girls in the state of Borno. “I beg you,” he said, “come and see for yourself.” Knowing of Boko Haram but nothing of the Fulani, I accept.

...The 2019 Global Terrorism Index estimates that Fulani extremists have become deadlier than Boko Haram and accounted for the majority of the country’s 2,040 documented terrorist fatalities in 2018. To learn more about them, I travel to Godogodo, in the center of the country, where I meet a beautiful woman named Jumai Victor, 28. On July 15, she says, Fulani extremists stormed into her village on long-saddle motorcycles, three to a bike, shouting “Allahu Akbar!” They torched houses and killed her four children before her eyes.

When her turn came and they noticed she was pregnant, a discussion ensued. Some didn’t want to see her belly slit, so they compromised by cutting up and amputating her left arm with a machete. She speaks quickly and emotionlessly, staring into space as if she lost her face along with her arm. The village chief, translating for her, chokes up. Tears stream down his cheeks when she finishes her account.

I venture north to Adnan, where Lyndia David, 34, tells her story of survival. On the morning of March 15, rumors reached her village that Fulani raiders were nearby. She was dressing for church as her husband prepared to join a group of men who’d stand watch. He urged her to take refuge at her sister’s home in another village.

Her first night there, sentinels woke her with a whistle. She left the house to find flames spreading around her. Fulani surrounded her. Then she heard a voice: “Come this way, you can get through!” She did, and her putative savior leapt out of the underbrush, cut three fingers off her right hand, carved the nape of her neck with his machete, shot her, doused her body with gasoline, and lit it. She somehow survived. A few weeks later she returned to her village and learned that the raiders had leveled it the same night. Her husband was among the 72 they murdered.

...“It’s hardly surprising,” says Dalyop Salomon Mwantiri, one of the few lawyers in the region who dare to represent victims. “The general staff of the Nigerian army is a Fulani. The whole bureaucracy is Fulani.”

So is President Muhammadu Buhari.

...There are “too many Christians in Lagos,” says Abadallah, who looks to be in his 40s. “The Christians are dogs and children of dogs. You say Christians. To us they are traitors. They adopted the religion of the whites. There is no place here for friends of the whites, who are impure.” A postcard vendor joins the group and offers me portraits of Osama bin Laden and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. He agrees the Christians will eventually leave and Nigeria will be “free.”

...Will the West let history repeat itself in Nigeria? Will we wait, as usual, until the disaster is done before taking notice? Will we stand by as international Islamic extremism opens a new front across this vast land, where the children of Abraham have coexisted for so long?

Read more here.

One Marine's story

Michael Phillips wrote in the Wall Street Journal,

...Eighteen years after the Sept. 11 hijackings spurred the U.S.-led invasion to oust the Taliban and its al Qaeda allies, American troops are still fighting and dying in Afghanistan. Negotiations between the U.S. and Taliban have lurched forward and stumbled backward.

Over the course of the war, 775,000 U.S. troops have fought in Afghanistan; 28,000 of them have served five or more tours. More than 2,300 Americans have died there, and 20,000 have suffered wounds, including amputated limbs and brain injuries.

A much larger number, more than 120,000, returned home with symptoms of post-traumatic stress, the hidden wounds of America’s longest war.

Michael then goes on to tell the story of a Marine who came back from Afghanistan with PTSD. It is a superbly written story that you can read here.

"There’s a lot that we don’t know about our parents, and sometimes the not-knowing is more comfortable. It allows us to see the best in them."

Francesca Fontana writes in the Wall Street Journal,

...There’s a lot that we don’t know about our parents, and sometimes the not-knowing is more comfortable. It allows us to see the best in them.

...I wanted to believe my dad would tell me the truth after a lifetime of deception and distance. Instead, I had to face the reality that he probably never would.

...Despite knowing that I knew what really happened, he couldn’t give up the fantasies he had created. He needed the lies. It made me feel sorry for him, so I just let him talk. We all go through childhood wondering who our parents are when they’re not Mom or Dad. That’s why some of us eavesdrop, sneak into closets and rummage through dresser drawers in secret. As adults, we have to decide how much to dig and how much to let lie.

Months later, as I was finishing this story, I told my dad that I didn’t believe him. I laid out what he had told me, and how it differed from what my reporting showed. I told him I thought he was lying. I asked what he thought about that, and he shrugged.

“People believe what they believe,” he said. “You believe one thing, I believe something else.”

Mr. Fontana served 44 months in prison for his part in a group of people who impersonated police officers and stole money from drug dealers in Chicago. Read more here.

"God himself had become manifest in human form!"

Tom Holland writes in the Wall Street Journal,

...The secularization of Christmas is not quite the repudiation of Christianity that it may seem. This is because the very concept of the secular—far from being neutral—originated in a specifically Christian context. The emergence of church and state as distinct spheres, and in due course the very notion of a secular space, was deeply rooted in theological assumptions—assumptions that are exemplified by the Christmas story. When Joseph traveled to Bethlehem, he did so in obedience to the ruler of the Roman world, master of the greatest power on the face of the planet, but in the womb of his wife was the king of very heaven. The conviction that there are two dimensions—those of the earthly and the celestial, the daily and the eternal, Caesar’s and God’s—was embedded in the very beginning of the Christian story. The result was a tension that has endured for two millennia and is still manifest in the culture war being fought over Christmas today.

“And it came to pass in those days,” as the Gospel of Luke tells us, “that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus, that all the world should be taxed.” Whether the census that required Joseph and his wife to travel to Bethlehem ever happened is generally doubted by scholars, but no one doubts the rapacity of the order to which the Jews, in the decades before Jesus’ birth, found themselves subject. The Roman Empire was one immense tax demand, delivered and enforced at sword-point. It is no surprise that the men who did the Romans’ dirty business for them should feature in the Gospels as moral outcasts, on a level with prostitutes. Tax collectors were agents of the rawest oppression. To be poor and a provincial was to have little choice but to tread carefully. A Roman soldier might well force a civilian to serve him as a porter or provide him with a billet—and no woman, certainly, ever met a legionary without a measure of dread. This, then, was the world into which the pregnant Mary brought her son.

The horrors, though, were precisely what framed the miracle. As Ignatius of Antioch, a century after the birth of Jesus, described the nativity: “Now everything that had been perfectly prepared in the counsel of God began, and all creation was in turmoil at this plan for the complete destruction of death.” Angels appeared to the shepherds, parting the curtain that for so long had veiled heaven from earth, and a star appeared to the wise men, marking the end of the ancient empire of evil. Both events served as signs that a new order of time had begun. God himself, Ignatius exclaimed in awe, had become manifest in human form: “Every kind of magic was destroyed, and every bond of wickedness disappeared; ignorance was removed, and the old kingdom abolished.”

Read more here.

Where were the whistleblowers when America really needed them?

In the Wall Street Journal, James Freeman writes,

...The FBI shared all of their alleged concerns about Mr. Page’s Russian connections with the FISA court but did not share key information—including the fact that Mr. Page was working with the CIA. Is there any chance a FISA judge would have approved the FBI’s surveillance request on Mr. Page if his assistance to another arm of the federal government had been fully disclosed?

The full details on the Obama-Comey FBI’s abuse of power in 2016 are taking years to come to light, and not just because too many prize-winning media outlets failed to recognize them.

Where were the whistleblowers when America really needed them?

Read more here.

"The FBI is far from alone in this disgrace."

In the Wall Street Journal, Kimberley Strassel writes,

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court this week blasted the Federal Bureau of Investigation for “misconduct” in the Carter Page surveillance warrant.

...Presiding Judge Rosemary Collyer issued her four-page rebuke of the FBI Tuesday, after a Justice Department inspector general report publicly exposing the FBI’s abuses. The judge blasted the FBI for misleading the court by providing “unsupported or contradicted” information and by withholding exculpatory details about Mr. Page. The FISC noted the seriousness of the conduct and gave the FBI until Jan. 10 to explain how it will do better.

The order depicts a court stunned to discover that the FBI failed in its “duty of candor,” and angry it was duped. That’s disingenuous. To buy it, you’d have to believe that not one of the court’s 11 members—all federal judges—caught a whiff of this controversy until now. More importantly, you’d have to ignore that the court was directly informed of the FBI’s abuses nearly two years ago.

On Feb. 7, 2018, Devin Nunes, then chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, sent a letter to Judge Collyer informing her of its findings in his probe of the FBI’s Page application. He wrote that “the Committee found that the FBI and DOJ failed to disclose the specific political actors paying for uncorroborated information” that went to the court, “misled the FISC regarding dissemination of this information,” and “failed to correct these errors in the subsequent renewals.” Mr. Nunes asked the court whether any transcripts of FISC hearings about this application existed, and if so, to provide them to the committee.

Judge Collyer responded a week later, with a dismissive letter that addressed only the last request. The judge observed that any such transcripts would be classified, that the court doesn’t maintain a “systematic record” of proceedings and that, given “separation of power considerations,” Mr. Nunes would be better off asking the Justice Department. The letter makes no reference to the Intelligence Committee findings.

Mr. Nunes tried again in a June 13, 2018, follow-up letter, which I have obtained. He told the court that Congress “uncovered evidence that DOJ and FBI provided incomplete and potentially incorrect information to the Court,” and that “significant relevant information was not disclosed to the Court.” This was Mr. Nunes telling FISC exactly what Inspector General Michael Horowitz told the world—18 months sooner. Mr. Nunes asked Judge Collyer to “initiate a thorough investigation.” To assist her, the same month he separately sent FISC “a classified summary of Congress’s findings and facts” to that point. The letter was signed by all 13 Republican members of the Intelligence Committee.

Judge Collyer blew him off. Her letter on June 15, 2018, is four lines long. She informs Mr. Nunes she’s received his letter. She says she’s also received his classified information. She says she’s instructing staff to provide his info to “the judges who ruled on the referenced matters.” She thanks him for his “interest” in the court.

This is stunning, given the House Intelligence Committee has oversight jurisdiction of FISA. And Mr. Nunes didn’t come to the court with mere suspicions; he provided facts, following a thorough investigation. The court at the very least had an obligation to demand answers from the FBI and the Justice Department.

It didn’t—because it didn’t want to know. One of the biggest criticisms of the FISA court since its inception is that it is a rubber stamp for law enforcement. The FISA process is one in which government lawyers secretly and unilaterally present their case for surveillance to judges, with no defense attorney to argue in opposition. The system relies on judges to push back, but they don’t. Until recently, the FISA court routinely approved 100% of the applications before it.

Just as it rubber-stamped the Page warrant. That application made clear the FBI was asking to spy on a U.S. citizen associated with a presidential candidate. And the court was provided a footnote indicating political operators were involved in producing the allegations. If ever there was time to grill a few government lawyers, this was it. Yet from the inspector general’s evidence, the court whipped through the warrant with barely a blink.

The secrecy of FISA had always shielded the players from scrutiny. But Mr. Nunes’s inspection of the Page applications threatened to highlight this rot in the system. Judge Collyer’s dismissive letters made clear just what the court thought of Congress poking its nose into the secret club.

After the Horowitz report, the court had no choice but to respond. It’s predictably pointing fingers at the FBI, but the court should itself account for its failure to provide more scrutiny, and its refusal to act when Mr. Nunes first exposed the problem. The FBI is far from alone in this disgrace.

Everybody hurts sometime

My take on tonight's #DemDebate#Dempocalypse pic.twitter.com/Q0eljH7SLz

— Carpe Donktum🔹 (@CarpeDonktum) December 20, 2019

The left gets religion!

In Gateway Pundit, Eric Blair publishes a post written in Facebook by Franklin Graham. Graham criticizes Christianity Today for supporting the impeachment of Donald Trump. Read Graham's post here.

Don Surber also responds to Christianity Today with some humor and some theology here.

I knew this would happen!

Talk is cheap!

That was fast!

Yesterday we learned that footage of Epstein's initial suicide attempt was not available. Today, prosecutors announced that the footage had been found! Read about it here.

Beethoven's most joyous?

A little girl tips a musician, which is then followed by a joyful "flashmob."

Pompeo tells Iranian people that the U.S. supports their struggle for freedom

In the Washington Free Beacon, Adam Kredo writes an article entitled "Pompeo Vows to Stand Beside Iranian Protesters Seeking to Topple Hardline Regime...New sanctions hit senior Iranian officials complicit in mass human rights abuses."
Read it here.

Court-reshaping

Selwin Duke writes in the American Thinker about How Democrats Could Undo Trump’s Lasting Legacy in the Courts. Read it here.