“Coming down the stretch, it’s Cankles out in front — but wait, here comes Rule Of Law! Rule of Law pouring it on now! It’s anybody’s race!…”
“Come on, Rule of Law! Move yer bloomin’ arse!!”
With thanks to the indefatigable JK, here’s more on the Clinton investigation.
35 Comments
It is a pattern of an organized crime syndicate. From Blackwater to Fast & Furious. These crooks have a system of corruption, it is dressed up as a political machine. They are a clique.
I have to say, I was born in the 50’s, I can give you only my perspective from that timeline, and that upon the installation of the Clinton regime, I look upon this stretch of history and it is clear as blue sky these crooks have almost single handedly transformed this Republic into a banana republic. No one else has had the level of influence and the corrosive effect upon our government as those two psychopaths.
Valerie Jarret and Al Capone in a pantsuit.
The article linked by JK has HRC claiming “It’s not going to happen.” That means one of two things to me: Either the fix is in, or she is Cool Hand Luke’s evil twin in a pantsuit (with cankles). Our only hope is that it’s the latter alternative and that the FBI/NSA calls her bluff.
Otherwise, we are thoroughly f*cked.
It doesn’t matter what the evidence is, Hillary will not be indicted. I doubt there will even be an FBI recommendation – anyone involved in it would be purged. But, do you really think it would affect the election if the FBI did recommend an indictment before the election? At this point in our history, the only people who care are people who would not vote for her in any event.
To me, the only major issue between now and November is whether Hillary is above the law or not. If she is then the rest doesn’t really matter, for she as well as the approved governing class will be above it as well. Soviet America. Then it is up to we the people to decide if we should remain within the law or not. This can get ugly after a while.
Let me end the suspense for you, Whitewall:
1. Hillary is above the law, as the current administration has been since 1/20/09.
2. “We the People” won’t do anything about it, within or without the law.
DJF, I hear your frustration and there is ample reason for it because of our elected officials. Unelected law enforcement however have an oath of office as well. FBI, CIA and commissioned military officers swear the following–
“I, [name], do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God.” Additionally, schooled CIA employees know that the Constitution also defines the role of federal employees: “To establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare and secure the blessings of liberty.” I also understand that in some quarters, military officers are in near revolt over how they are being used and abused. The citizens may not have to act first or even alone. I believe Federal law enforcement in all its branches are Patriots first.
“I believe Federal law enforcement in all its branches are Patriots first.”
I wish you were right, Whitewall, but I respectfully disagree. I think they are just employees doing a job, no matter what their oath says. The virus of political correctness has been doing its work in all government institutions, federal, state, and local, including the military, for decades now, just as it has done similar work in corporate America. The Left is now mopping up any remaining organized dissent within these institutions.
As for the voters, most of them give more thought to their March Madness brackets, and any anger tends to be expressed irrationally (e.g. voting for Trump, who can’t win and wouldn’t change anything if he did). And you can’t pull off a revolution with a bunch of angry 50+ men.
djf…then that leaves it all up to the military, which is always the end of “democracy”.
Whitewall, the military is also thoroughly infiltrated by the Left. The cumulative effect of Clinton and Obama on promotions has taken its toll. The military is not going to save us from the Left. Anyway, there’s no precedent for that in our history.
Well then, if all else fails, it will be “Irish Democracy”:
Now to “Irish Democracy,” an ironic term used by author and Yale professor James Scott in his new book, “Two Cheers for Anarchism“:
Quiet, anonymous, and often complicitous, lawbreaking and disobedience may well be the historically preferred mode of political action for peasant and subaltern classes, for whom open defiance is too dangerous….One need not have an actual conspiracy to achieve the practical effects of a conspiracy. More regimes have been brought, piecemeal, to their knees by what was once called “Irish Democracy”–the silent, dogged resistance, withdrawal, and truculence of millions of ordinary people–than by revolutionary vanguards or rioting mobs.
Must this be the default response to an ever-growing federal government unbound from any meaningful Constitutional limits, metastasizing and increasingly contemptuous of any law deemed inconvenient to the ruling political classes?
Many millions will vote on the question.
Me make ourselves extremely difficult to govern.
There is a constitutional imperative presumption of innocence in America. A government charge is proof of nothing. It is called Habeas Corpus, aka the 4th Amendment. The burden of proof lies upon the government.
Doug, you are speaking of a charge(s) against Hillary?
Robert, Dan, and Doug:
Based on what I’m hearing, as well as on what I’m not hearing (Wherefore art thou “silent majority”?), I think we are thoroughly you know what. You heard it here first. Sigh …
Instapundit @ 10:30am today has a good add on to Jk’s link.
Here is the link that Robert refers to at 1:40 pm, above:
http://20committee.com/2016/03/07/the-xx-committee-hillary-emailgate-reader/
I don’t think Clinton, Inc. is going to get indicted. Yes, this is a banana republic.
I understand all the negativity re the “Red Queen”, but I am not that far down the road yet. Actual banana republics are a long way from where we are…trust me. Many miles to go before this fandango is over.
I do so want to trust you, Robert. But do you know something the general informed public doesn’t? I do not have a “need to know” any specifics, but just a nod of your head in affirmation would help me sleep at night.
Henry, I mean about the “banana republic” part. Within law enforcement I have little insight.
Whitewall, maybe you and I aren’t a banana republic, along with millions of fellow Americans, because we respect the ideas that make what the rule of law what it is. It is the glue that holds us together regardless.
Come on man, you really believe the federal government operates by the original intent and idea of the rule of law designed to limit what it can not do within the bounds of the republican form of government?
If it doesn’t, what do you call this republic then?
I’ll be frank with you, this all below is what I think in a nutshell:
“All government, in its essence, is a conspiracy against the superior man: its one permanent object is to oppress him and cripple him…The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane and intolerable, and so, if he is romantic, he tries to change it. And even if he is not romantic personally he is very apt to spread discontent among those who are.”
— H.L. Mencken
“It does not take a majority to prevail but rather an irate, tireless minority, keen on setting brushfires of freedom in the minds of men.”
— Samuel Adams
The time is upon us where if you are not an irate tireless minority, a plurality that occupies the moral high ground, then by dint of tacit consent, your consent enables tyrants. This I believe with no doubt whatsoever is what is underway. It is on the threshold of a logarithmic increase. These things begin in modest fashion, and many involved in its beginnings suffer much, are killed or imprisoned, are shunned by the majority, they become the despicable, it is the way of such things.
Because the greatest enemy of liberty is not the tyrant, it is those who ignore the truth of things. The multitude who are afraid of facing the hard truths. The little totalitarians among us. But even as those who ignore the truths are in a majority, they are not a majority which prevails, as the consequences of ignoring the truth can not be ignored forever. Truth has no agenda. It has no ulterior motives, or special interest.
What I mean by the previous earlier comment in this thread is there is no law now, only convenience of being among the protected class, and anything is permissible or denied by the whim of the protected when the rule of law is replaced by the rule of men.
The only rules are the rules don’t apply to the protected. The rule of rules is to change the rules to protect the protected when the rules require changing to keep them the protected. That way all the protected protect each other.
The Dirt People are subjects to be ruled by whatever rules are convenient and necessary to keep them the Dirt People and ruled. In this way the protected perpetuate being protected. As it functions the Dirt People are left with compliance and no avenues grievance or redress, but personal defiance and resistance, civil disobedience, and violent rebellion. It is the ones who are not afraid who begin to defy and rebel the protected.
The protected created and retain a special sub class, a Praetorian guard in the form of armed badged leg breakers, who receive protected status and a multitude of protected benefits if they use force and coercion in the form of threat of violence and application of lethal force to enforce the rules the protected create out of whole cloth to protect themselves and their special interests, and protect their protected class’s from the Dirt People. And coercion as threat and use of force ultimately is all the protected have ever had in the form of power.
The protected also have particularly special, and very flexible rules for The Dirt People involving the transfer of Dirt People wealth to the protected.
It is important to protect The Dirt People from being anything but Dirt People, because the protected need the Dirt People for a few things, because the Dirt People are producers of things the protected require to live the protected life, but the Dirt People do not all see they do not need the protected, and what they produce does not need to be protected by the protected in the first place.
So it is very important the Dirt People think the protected make the rules, and that the Dirt People have to obey the rules that only protect the protected in the first place.
Where the protected go wrong, where it all begins to fall apart, is when the Dirt People begin to figure out there are no rules, there is only the equality of primal freedoms of men and organic liberty and self determination that are legitimate, because those things are what the idea of rule of law are based upon. It then becomes a crisis of legitimacy.
The motive power in Dirt People who realize these truths of themselves begins at some point to take on a cascade of preference and choice anathema to the existence and ongoing protection of the protected. It becomes existential threat to the protected. It is not fury of the dirt people, but cold calculated withdrawal of consent that threatens the power of the protected over the dirt people. The one thing absolutely essential to the protected is consent of the dirt people, tacit or coerced.
Consent is a singulary unique possession, there is nothing else like it but self defense. Consent is intellectual property, something which can not be taken, it can only be given. Property in all its forms is the strong link in liberty. Notice how the protected have a myraid of ways to deny the dirt people their property through a multitude of schemes and forms of extortion.
Everything is coming down to consent and withdrawal of it. Literally, what a minority who are refusing to consent to any longer. The protected are now in the first critical stage of trying to survive their own illegitimacy.
Too late. To a growing plurality of dirt people the protected have zero redeeming value. In fact, they seen as having no value whatsoever.
You know why Trump is like a guy running through Hell with an open can of gasoline?
He is themselves, the protected’s opposite, they created him. It is the balance of illegitimacy and legitimacy between evil and good trying to balance itself.
It is beginning to dawn on Hell, and Hell is terrified of what they have created out of unintended consequences. What Trump symbolizes is the protecters black swan event.
Doug I’m with you a great deal especially toward the last part where you are pretty much describing what I mentioned earlier…”Irish Democracy”. Trump is a flash point at-hopefully-the right moment.
Doug,
That is a lot to digest and think about, but I think it deserves an effort to do so.
At the moment, my off the top of my head questions are: What about the low information (LI) and the “just give me free shit (JGMFS)” crowds? What fraction of the “dirt people” do they represent? If they (the LI and JGMFS) represent a substantial portion of the dirt people, how does that affect your theory (if at all)?
I forgot to add the so-called “useful idiots” (UI)” crowd to the mix of those who belong to the “dirt people” (but are not likely to participate in any opposition to the so-called “protected”). I know there’s a lot of overlap among the three crowds I have mentioned, but do all these people represent a prohibitive obstacle to your theory, Doug?
Doug,
That’s some nutshell!
Doug,
Again, all power beyond the immediate and personal is an abstraction, a shared belief. There is nothing physical about it whatsoever. This is why the Hillary Clinton investigation is such a dangerous game for those now in power.
djf,
Do not underestimate the seething anger in America, and elsewhere in the West, right now. These societies are in what physicists call a “superheated” state: heated far beyond the boiling point, waiting only for the right sort of “nucleation” event to trigger an explosive phase transition.
If I understand what your thinking Henry, it doesn’t matter who or how many. I think what does is motive power and audacity.
Remember that link for Eric Frank Russell’s story Then There Where None? It is about a plurality. You really should read it.
Brother, a plurality who say’s “I Won’t!”, and MYOB!,(Mind Your Own Business!) has to be the most difficult thing about us human’s to describe. What is at the heart of what I am trying to convey, and really, understand, is what a plurality of people who say I won’t! is.
Regardless of my flailing about with words, there is something I sense which is the crux of what is happening at a grass roots level, an undercurrent of hearts and minds that have begun to transform from a nebulous state to one of solidarity. It is not just an awakening, but a commonality in thought and perceptions. Look at us here on Malcolm’s wonderful blog, we agree to disagree, and we all sniff each others butts like dogs making acquaintance, but as time goes by a current of like mindedness evolves. We could never agree on everything, that is only reasonable, but it is the act of reason itself between us that is what is great. It is outside the memes and narratives of the status quo, and it possesses a certain motive power and audacity itself. It is defiant, and it is resistance. Subtle and sublime, but it is an undercurrent.
A transformation which has a bedrock quality to it. The closest term I can think of is preference cascade, and the literary definition of a Paradigm, a seas change in thinking. The fact it is a minority has no bearing on the dynamics, because I think these things are in themselves a motive power of profound potential, and that is an entirely different critter than what motivates a free shit army and useful dupes, never mind the protected classes.
I can’t define who is the dirt people, there are so many phase lines it would be pointless to try, but even more important is people are people, you just have to accept that and have humility which tempers your judgement of others. But that doesn’t mean that like for instance you have to suffer your freedom and liberty because a majority have given up theirs for free stuff or the promise of security.
Liberty is dangerous. Very dangerous. A lot of folks are scared of total freedom. But that is the beauty of liberty too. You get to have a gun, say what you like, give the powers that be the finger, make moon shine, grow marijuana, refuse to be taxed, build the castle of your dreams, and make money any way you like, long as your not hurting’ another guy. It is pretty simple. What is most dangerous is your responsible for everything, and your going to get your arse blown away and take a dirt nap if your not careful and caring of others. But what is wrong with that?
Which is if you give it a good think, not a problem and if anything when you figure out how liberty works, the exact opposite is true of fearing total freedom.
Liberty is a everyone is in it together one way or another kind of thing in this world now. There is those who want liberty, and those who don’t. There really isn’t a middle ground on this. Though some bullshit themselves and others believing they can sit on the fence with their finger in the air and reap the wind.
I have this gut feeling we are all, because we as a people have long ignored our primal rights and our responsibility that go along with those rights, like the pig, committed. No one is going to get a free ride on what is in the wind.
Ignoring what is coming doesn’t change the truth of us.
It only makes it that much more difficult to take care of when the bill comes due.
If that isn’t motive power itself I don’t know what is.
And I’m not doom and gloom, f anything I’m an eternal optimist. I believe we Americans got everything going for us, our faults not withstanding. I think we got a cultural tolerance which is part and parcel what makes us a moral society, and a polite one also. There is something about us, and I think it is BECAUSE we are a people born into liberty, our government not withstanding either, that audacity and an indomitable will is innate. Not everyone has it, or recognizes it, but more than enough people do, or at the least sense something about it in themselves.
Bottom line, there is nothing wrong with my primal rights, nor my liberty, my self determination is well, exactly that, mine.
So does the free shit army and Lenin’s useful idiots, cultural marxism’s cannon fodder matter?
My answer?
I think they are about to be as obsolete as the GOPe and the rest of the political class. If for no other reason they are all essentially the same thing. Parasites. All don’t want liberty because without it they can maintain their parasitic state upon the state.
It is the Illusion of Power which at all costs must be maintained is what your saying Malcolm?
And right now the protected are up on Leon Russell’s tiny wire?
A Faustian bargain they have made which the bill for is coming due?
Richard Fernandez said something interesting – “Ambitious men through the ages have made the mistake of imagining that power grows in proportion to the coercive force they possessed. In fact there is an inverse relationship between coercion and lasting authority. States fail not from a lack of a police but from a surfeit of lies. Societies die from the loss of trust. The destruction of trust may in retrospect be the single most destructive act committed by elitist politics in the Western democracies. The elites may stopped caring a long time ago, what they never expected was that one day the masses would return the compliment.”
Henry,
There is that splendid axiom about giving a man a fish you feed him for a day, teach him to fish and he feeds a village.
But what if you have to show that man such a thing is even possible?
I guess the question in regards to what we are talking about is what happens when that man has that epiphany? Is it like setting a brush fire in the hearts and minds?
Some say Trump is running an insurgency. I think there is truth in that. This election is sure looking like a war of hearts and minds. One side is astro turf serving up the usual Kool Aid, the other is grass roots serving up the truth. The pundits have a serious problem, their’s is a science of winning minds and Trump’s is the art of winning hearts.
Doug, two things:
1) If I read you correctly, you advocate a fairly doctrinaire libertarianism, which I agree is a tempting ideology. I first encountered it as a boy in the sci-fi books of Robert Heinlein, and of course it has always been part of the American mythos. But there are, in the real world, practical limits on the libertarian ideal; as the years go by it seems more and more likely to me that the “sweet spot” (for Western populations, at least) needs more hierarchy, more traditional order, and less absolute individualism than the purest libertarian vision recommends.
2) Your comments are good, and welcome, but I must urge you to be as pithy as you can. One feels that you just pour it all out. Write it all down first, then read, reflect, prune, and post!
Doug,
To be frank (as well as TBH), I am a novice with respect to psychology and sociology. My background has always been immersed in the so-called “hard” sciences (not necessarily “difficult” but rather demanding of rigorous thinking). I respect the softer sciences; it’s just not how I’m wired.
I am much more comfortable with rigour than with more speculative thinking. I hasten to add, however, that speculation is necessary (even vital) in the hard sciences though it is seldom (if ever) sufficient in developing testable theory.
I guess what I’m saying is that your ideas sound reasonable to me, but in order to adopt them, I feel I would have to take some of them on faith.
Malcolm, is that sweet spot a kind of benign feudalism?
A simular series of thoughts have passed through my head, and somehow I can’t but help think the nature of the State has grown too large far too oppressive. It always seems to bring me around to Hobbs theory of the Leviathan.
Then I think of the compact of confederation of the colonies pre ratification of the USC. Been trying to read everything on the CoC, and it strikes me as a viable alternative. After all the colonies became sovereign states in their own right, it was after centralism reared its head the sovereignty of each state has diminished to almost vassal state existence. Hence we as sovereign citizens.
Are you being diplomatic with me? Figured you would call me a at least a secessionist at heart. I’m not quite sure what libertarianism is, it seems a contradiction in itself in some ways. For me personally, there is no compromising on my liberty and self determination. It come first.
Hienlein always struck me as a classic patriot rebel in the American Revolution style, he had some Sam Adams in him someplace, a thinking man’s firebrand with a warriors spirit living in later age. His young man’s story series are traditional morals and virtues stories and very heart warming though. I couldn’t get enough of his books as a child and young man. It is a wonder some made it past his more traditional publishers of the times looking back.
Point well and humbly taken about composition. Thanks.
I’m not making an excuse, but I have no formal education, dropped out of school at 14, so I appreciate your constructive criticism. Got a severe case of dyslexia and I struggle with transposing thoughts from my mind to my fingers.
But I’m really pleased you appreciate some things I write, that means a lot coming from you and the other guys.
So much is happening right now, interesting times that’s for sure. I’ll try to keep your advice in mind and not let my exuberance run my mouth :-)
Doug,
Whereas you dropped out of school at 14, my own formal education didn’t end until I was 28, with a wife and a 2-year-old child. I can only surmise that you have conducted an impressive self-directed education based on the reading of a whole lot of books. You are to be commended for your achievement.
Doug,
I’m not being diplomatic, or at least no more than I always am with everyone.
You wrote:
Nor can any of the rest of us. It clearly has grown far to large, far too centralized, and far too oppressive. The system the Founders put in place — which I think gave decentralized and generally non-hierarchical government the very best chance it could ever have been given — is no longer the system we live under. Theirs was a framework for a republic of individually sovereign states, granting power to the Federal administration only for a narrowly circumscribed list of functions. The system was explicitly designed to keep democracy, which these men wisely feared, tightly leashed and muzzled. Only one half of one branch of government — the House of Representatives — was exposed to direct election by the people, and because suffrage was limited, even that body was sheltered from the full-throated passions of the mob.
Now we have universal suffrage, and today we even hear calls to extend the franchise to non-citizens! The rights of the States exist today only at the pleasure of the Federal apparatus, and most of the laws we must obey aren’t even created by our representatives, but by a wholly unaccountable administrative bureaucracy that can only properly be understood as an entirely new branch of government, never mentioned in the Constitution.
As for the Constitution itself, the relentless action of the Court over the past century or so has loosened and fatigued its sinews to the point of infinite elasticity. (How anyone can find a right to gay marriage in the 14th Amendment, but not the right of the people to bear arms in the 2nd, is something that only a liberal can understand.) Today we have got to the point where the most fundamental and far-reaching principles of our laws and culture are routinely decided, for everyone from Alaska to Florida, from Hawaii to Maine, by a majority of one member of this unelected panel. Far from being a federation of largely independent sovereigns, the States have been hammered into a suffocating conformity, and can hardly pass a littering law without ultimate approval from Washington.
Finally, as I wrote in this post from last year, the nation no longer meets the “system requirements” — not only in terms of size, but more importantly as regards the composition, culture, and civic virtues of its population — for the operating system the Framers installed. I’ve said before that I do not expect the United States, as presently constituted, to last much longer. It has simply become too fissile; its internal polarization and repulsion have become too much for any political “strong force” to hold it together. I only hope that the explosion, when it comes, is not too destructive.
Malcolm,
To extend your “fissile” metaphor, the explosion itself might not be too destructive, but it is likely to initiate radioactive decay with a long enough half-life such that a satisfactory recovery may not be possible in the foreseeable future.
Americans (including the proto-American British Colonists) have endured existential crises on three occasions. And in each case the survival mechanism has been all out war: the Revolution; the Civil War; and the Second World War. The costs, of course, in lives and the nation’s economic health were enormous. But there it is — the only alternative, which is visible to me at this time, for nauseating and slow rotting away. I am not advocating either alternative. I’m just sayin’ …