A great idea: Move Washington out of Washington!

In American Greatness, Roger Kimball agrees with the Blackburn-Hawley plan to move ten federal agencies out of Washington D.C.

Have you noticed the odd feeling you get when walking around downtown D.C.? I used to think that it was because of the stately government buildings, the imposing aura of edifices like the Supreme Court (with its ironic motto, “Equal Justice Under Law”) or the Capitol or the White House. That’s part of it, no doubt, but for the daily pedestrian, an essential reality of life in Washington is brought home by the ubiquity of the lobbying efforts. They’re all there, the people that want something, and the people who get paid to articulate those wants to lawmakers, their gargantuan staffs, and the media. (I say “lawmakers,” though the House has pretty much given up on making laws for the sake of continuing their hit mini-series, “At Home with Impeachment.”)

Donald Trump came to office promising to “drain the swamp.” He has made a little, mostly rhetorical, progress around the edges. But the swampiness of the swamp is deep and inveterate. He will never succeed in that stupendous sanitary engineering project until he removes the thing that attracts the swamp creatures to Washington just as a rotting carcass attracts flies and other necrophagites: centers of power and influence.

In our day, anything that can be done to dismantle the Leviathan of the vast, unaccountable apparat of administrative overreach should be done. The Blackburn-Hawley plan is not the end of the story. But it might mark the beginning of a sunny new chapter. It’s time to get on with draining the swamp, emptying out those pots full of unwary frogs. Taking a good bit of “Washington” out of Washington is a good way to start.

Read more here.

"The depths of their immorality is unlimited."

Sundance reports at The Conservative Treehouse,

On October 13th 2016, in response to the coordinated institutional attacks upon his campaign, presidential candidate Donald Trump delivered a speech that defined his moment in our nation’s history.

Sundance has the entire transcript of that speech and additional information here.

Some excerpts from Trump's speech:

...I didn’t need to do this. I built a great company, and I had a wonderful life. I could have enjoyed the benefits of years of successful business for myself and my family, instead of going through this absolute horror show of lies, deceptions and malicious attacks. I’m doing it because this country has given me so much, and I feel strongly it was my turn to give back.

Some people warned me this campaign would be a journey to hell. But they are wrong, it will be a journey to heaven because we will help so many people.

...I will not lie to you. These false attacks hurt. To be lied about, to be slandered, to be smeared so publicly and before your family, is painful.

What the Clinton Machine is doing to me, and my family, is egregious beyond words. It is reprehensible beyond description.

But I also know, it’s not about me – it’s about all of you. It’s about all of us, together, as a country.

...We will vote to put this corrupt government cartel out of business. We will remove from our politics the special interests who have betrayed our workers, our borders, our freedoms, and our sovereign rights as a nation. We will end the politics of profit, we will end the rule of special interests, we will put a stop to the raiding of our country – and the disenfranchisement of our people.

Read more here

"The media’s practice of anonymous sources allowed Strzok to hurt Trump without exposing his own biases."

Daniel Greenfield writes at Sultan Knish,

...Leaking, not football, is the supreme sport of our nation’s capital. Sabotage and self-promotion are the two reasons that government types leak. And this was clearly sabotage. Election Day was coming up and a top investigation figure was seeding damaging stories about President Trump through the media.

"Article is out, but hidden behind paywall so can't read it," Strzok's mistress texted him.

"Wsj? Boy that was fast. Should I 'find' it and tell the team?" he asked.

The team wasn’t aware of what Strzok was up to. And he didn’t want them to find out. Like other anti-Trump operatives, Strzok was playing a complicated double game. He was pretending to conduct fair investigations of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, even as he wanted her to win and him to lose.

Negative pre-election stories coming from inside the government were one way to do it. The media’s practice of anonymous sources allowed Strzok to hurt Trump without exposing his own biases.

The media coverage of the fake investigation was shaped by activists like Strzok. The public only saw the final product on CNN. Only now is it getting a sense of how that message was manufactured and distributed in the shadows.

Strzok and Page were part of a larger Washington D.C. establishment. Its members might work for the Washington Post, the EPA, and the FBI or for one of the big law firms, but they were all living in the same swamp. And they shared a common view of Trump as a threat to their way of doing business.

The leaks were the swamp’s way of doing business. Hit pieces were its insurance policy against change.

But every action has an equal and opposite reaction.

The investigations of Trump triggered counter-investigations of the investigators. Strzok had warned Page not to use her work phone for these searches. But, like Hillary Clinton, it was already too late. The text messages of the investigators reveal the corruption of the investigation. And they show the level of coordination between the media and Trump’s opponents within the FBI.

The Fusion GPS story has told us a great deal about what goes on behind the scenes in the media. The Strzok and Page texts are a window into how the big government swamp was dealing with Trump.

Peter Strzok wanted an insurance policy against Trump’s victory. But he should have considered an insurance policy against swamp drainage instead.

Read more here.

Is Mueller's end game to take down Trump?

Daniel Greenfield writes at Front Page Magazine,

...When a crime wouldn’t exist without an investigation, then the investigation created the crime.

And it’s the investigation that is the crime.

The secondary crime here was created by entrapping Flynn as part of an investigation that was supposedly pursuing a primary crime that it, once again, failed to prove.

And Team Mueller has yet to find hide or hair of this crime. After all its grandstanding, it has yet to charge a single person for the crime it was supposed to be investigating. But it has managed to charge two people, George Papadopoulos and Michael Flynn, for lying to investigators. It has not charged them with doing a single illegal thing that predated the Mueller investigation.

...While Flynn didn’t violate the law, he interfered with Obama’s foreign policy agenda. And Obama officials did consider that a crime. While Petraeus’ lie was established by a recording made by his mistress, Flynn was eavesdropped on for the benefit of members of the Obama administration.

While Flynn didn’t violate the law, he interfered with Obama’s foreign policy agenda. And Obama officials did consider that a crime. While Petraeus’ lie was established by a recording made by his mistress, Flynn was eavesdropped on for the benefit of members of the Obama administration.

...The endgame, as Andrew McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor, has made clear is to take down President Trump, not by establishing a crime, but by destabilizing his administration.

Mueller has produced no collusion, but what he offers is theater. The performance destroys lives. But its real goal is to undermine Trump domestically and internationally. The fake ABC News report that caused tremors in the stock market shows how the campaign can undermine Trump’s economic accomplishments by raising the specter of impeachment. And why should North Korea, Iran, or the Palestinian Authority take Trump seriously when they get the impression that he might be gone soon?

The Mueller investigation is the latest act in the total war waged by Obama against Trump. The same rigged system that gave Hillary a pass is now being utilized to generate crimes by Trump officials.

Peter Strzok, the lead investigator in the Clinton email scandal, was sending pro-Clinton and anti-Trump messages during his extramarital affair with a woman working for FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe. McCabe’s wife had received a sizable amount of money from a Clinton ally. Strzok was on Mueller’s team until he had to be removed because of his shenanigans. Instead of coming clean about his removal, the FBI stonewalled Congress about what really happened. It’s gotten so bad that Rep. Nunes and other House Republicans are preparing to charge the FBI head with Contempt of Congress.

Strzok’s investigation of Trump relied on the Steele dossier that was paid for by Hillary and handfed by at least one current Russian intelligence operative. That was the same dossier that figures in the FBI chose to fund despite its utter lack of credibility and its partisan origins in the Clinton campaign.

We’re now in Act 3 of a leftist conspiracy to invent a conspiracy to justify its own conspiracy.

In Act 1, the Clintons created the Trump-Russia conspiracy theory and used a British former intelligence agent with connections to Russia and the FBI to inject the dossier into the FBI. In Act 2, Obama officials used the dossier to justify their eavesdropping on Trump officials In Act 3, Team Mueller is using that illegal eavesdropping to entrap and generate crimes against assorted Trump officials.

And the conspiracy theory is that the past election was illegitimate, that Trump doesn’t belong in the White House and Hillary does, and that radical measures must be taken against the First Amendment, the Electoral College and our entire political system to prevent such a “mistake” from occurring again.

That’s not just a conspiracy theory. It’s a radical leftist conspiracy against America.

Enough.

Mueller must go. This circus must end. And a real investigation must be conducted of the Obama administration’s eavesdropping on Trump officials and members of Congress. Both the DOJ and the FBI require urgent housecleaning. That is the only meaningful result of the Muller investigation.

Either you drain the swamp. Or the swamp drowns you.

Read more here.

"If you’re going to drain the swamp, you need to act hard and fast. Otherwise the swamp with suck you dry and throw your body into the muck to rot."

Bookworm writes about

Obama and flunkies used the instruments of government to spy on an American political adversary:

...Obama, of course, has always been good at plausible deniability. After all, how many administration scandals did Obama claim to have known nothing about until they broke in the media? Obama was either a liar (which we know he was) or an incompetent man with no control whatsoever over the administrative offices he was elected to govern (a possibility, but a lesser one).

Conservatives need to play this wiretapping hard, with constant allusions to Watergate. If they let go of the narrative for even a second, the Democrat party’s media outlet — aka the MSM — will bury it. Once buried, there’s nothing to stop the continued Deep State/Media/Obama effort to destroy the current administration. And no, even though that sounds paranoid, the way the media is getting leaks every single day from within the government forces the conclusion that there are people within the American government colluding with the media to take down the Trump presidency. You don’t need a tinfoil hat to tune you in to what’s happening.

If you’re going to drain the swamp, you need to act hard and fast. Otherwise the swamp with suck you dry and throw your body into the muck to rot.

Read more here.

Draining the swamp: where to start?

At Ricochet Marvin Folkertsma writes about draining the swamp.

The “swamp” in question, of course, is Washington DC, but also includes much of the bureaucracy, judiciary, and cultural command posts of the country, such as the media and entertainment industries. The tributaries comprise America’s educational system, long dominated by the radical left and protected by tenure and union power. It is this ideological effluent center that has done so much to poison the discourse of American politics, smearing every institution that contributed to the country’s greatness, and radiating hatred of all things most citizens hold dear—family, patriotism, free enterprise, free speech, freedom of religion, the Bill of Rights generally, and of course America’s founding documents, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

Certainly, storming the Bastille of Ivory Tower totalitarianism constitutes a very great challenge, beset with tribulations and struggle. But one must start somewhere, so here is a short list that could be considered by State legislatures, as well as by an institution that itself should be abolished—the Federal Department of Education.

Eliminate academic bloat by requiring schools to maintain a strict ratio of administrators to educators, with an emphasis on reducing the number of bureaucrats to the bare minimum. The ratio itself can be determined by those more familiar with the bureaucratic pathologies of top-heavy academic organizations. But schools that violate the standard would lose all funding. This measure might help to eliminate hordes of useless functionaries in “diversity” or “social justice” offices.
Require accountability for institutions that do not maintain law and order at academic functions where speakers (always conservatives) are not allowed to speak, or do so only at risk to their lives. That is, dismiss students, faculty, and administrators responsible for failing to maintain civil discourse. The problem is that too many school denizens or hangers-on are permitted to engage in mob action, disrupt the institution, destroy property, and threaten lives without facing any consequences. Enforcing this requirement might clarify some minds here and there, as well as explode the charade of leftist “tolerance.”
Transfer violations of the law to civil courts, under the assumption that university personnel are simply too biased and incompetent to act as plaintiffs, judges, juries, and enforcers at the same time. This stipulation might help to dispel frivolous accusations of rape, or charges of thought crime hurled against students or professors who believe in free speech.
Require greater “inclusiveness” in student organizations, which means, for instance, that if a Christian group is forced to admit atheists, then require, say, an LGBTQ group to admit those who believe in traditional marriage. After all, doesn’t “inclusiveness” and “tolerance” work both ways?
Abolish tenure. This oldie but goodie has been recommended to counter the radical left’s conquest of the academy. Whether such a policy would work is less clear, but it might deprive some radicals their safe, taxpayer supported perches to indoctrinate their students. The problem is that professors belong to that privileged niche in America, where, like journalists, they can say the most preposterous things without worrying at all about the consequences. Again, ending tenure might induce more sober, rational thought on the part of those who rarely have had anything to fear, not even fear itself.
Other proposals come to mind, such as requiring an ideological affirmative action program that would add more conservatives to faculty ranks. But a quota system applied to any hiring or recruiting situation is a loathsome solution that should never be encouraged, regardless of the goals in mind. Or, educators could be required (somehow) to teach subjects about their country to instill the values of good citizenship, respect for America’s contributions to the world, and the achievements of Western civilization generally.

Problem is, who would teach such courses? Imagine a Marxist teaching a course on capitalism—wait, you don’t have to imagine that, this practice been going on for decades. Or, a racist teaching a course on “whiteness studies,” which unfortunately is also standard operating procedure. Indeed, eliminating any course or department that has the word “studies” in it would enhance the health of the student body, like excising malignant tumors from an otherwise healthy organism.

Would any of these recommendations ever seriously be considered? Perhaps the most likely answer, after screeches of outrage from those in the academy have subsided, would be, “Have you lost your mind?” To which I would respond, I don’t think so, but I’m reasonably certain quite a few others have, and their privileged positions in America’s most fetid swamp will continue to feed the country’s other swamps indefinitely. That is, until the entire country is transformed into a vast swampland, and there is no America left to be found anymore.

Read more here.

"Political forces in the swamp keep the boil of controversy going regardless of the substance of the content behind it. Like Brennan implied, you don’t want those CIA folks to have a chip on their black-hatted shoulders because they can leak, and you cannot rebuke the leak without breaking the law and discussing classified information / briefings."

Sundance gives us his take on the Flynn controversy.

The Washington Post was the originating source of the ‘controversy’/’fiasco’. As previously stated numerous times, The Washington Post is the official leak-outlet for the political arm of the CIA. And the most politicized of all agents ever inside the CIA was John Brennan – a black hat extraordinaire.



The political agents within the “intelligence community”, ie. the Big Black Hats, took the position that General Michael Flynn must have lied to Vice President Pence because their interpretation of the phone call they intercepted was that Flynn did give some form (context and actual communication unknown) of forward assurance to the Russian emissary that a Trump administration would not approach the Russian Sanction issue (which, we should remember, is based on a non-existent vast Russian election hacking conspiracy) the same way as the Obama administration.

To wit, the pre-inaugural Trump intelligence community, politically motivated as they were, alerted President-elect Trump (through Sally Yates) that their opinion (baseline that Flynn lied) was such that Flynn had now opened himself up for blackmail from the Russians.

...It’s ridiculous, however it’s also simply how political forces in the swamp keep the boil of controversy going regardless of the substance of the content behind it. Like Brennan implied, you don’t want those CIA folks to have a chip on their black-hatted shoulders because they can leak, and you cannot rebuke the leak without breaking the law and discussing classified information / briefings.

It becomes a “he said, and You can’t say“; a one-way conversation with the insufferable media more than gleeful to sell an undermining narrative.

Dec 25th 2016 – Flynn talks to Russian counterpart
Dec 29th 2016 – Obama announces sanctions on Russia
Jan 15th 2017 – VP Pence appears on Face the nation.
Jan 20th 2017 – Inauguration
Jan 26th 2017 – Sally Yates (acting DOJ) informs President Trump there might be a conflict between VP Pence’s stated TV version (was told by Flynn), and what Intel community communicate to Yates that Flynn actually expressed.
Jan 27th 2017 – White House counsel begins investigation to discrepancy.
Unknown date – DOJ/White House Counsel investigation finds no violation of law in Flynn communication content w/ Russia and informs White House.
Legal issue Removed – Issue is: Did Flynn mislead President, Vice-President, and key White House staff on content of communication.
Feb 13th 2017 – White House accepts Flynn resignation

Read more here.

Will it happen?