Motus Mentis

Here’s a article that asks the question: if Russian trolls are indictable for election-meddling as unregistered foreign agents, why not Christopher Steele? Why not, as criminal co-conspirators, Fusion GPS, Perkins Coie, the DNC, and the Clinton campaign?

Nobody has written with more clarity on the web of intrigue surrounding Russia, the FISA court, the Mueller probe, election-tampering, possible abuses of power by the Obama-era FBI, DOJ, and IRS, and alleged “collusion” than the former Federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy. His latest column explores, with lucidity and detail, the difference between a criminal investigation and a counterintelligence operation, and why the distinction matters. He also examines the powers of the President regarding such things, and the question of what “obstruction of justice” could possibly mean as applied to the Chief Executive.

It’s one of his best so far. Read it here.

The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee has just released an interim report on its investigation into the skulduggery surrounding the Clinton email server. For your convenience, I’ve saved a copy here.

It is hardly possible to be a sentient being in the United States without observing that we are engaged an a great struggle for power. Politics always involves such wrangling, and of course our system of government was designed with that in mind, but in these last decades several trends, moving in one direction only, have brought us into a state of smoldering civil war.

First, the size, scope, and influence of the Federal government have increased steadily as power has flowed from the States to Washington. (There is perhaps no better chronicle and analysis of how this has happened, and why, than Robert Higgs’s Crisis and Leviathan, which I recommend to you all.)

Second, political and cultural commonality between the nation’s two great factions has almost entirely vanished, and with it all hope of comity and compromise. The political fissure has deepened to the point that it has become a moral conflict — and if I’m right about present-day liberalism being in fact a secular cryptoreligion, then it is a religious conflict as well, no different in essence from all the other wars of religion that have darkened the pages of history. Moral and religious conflicts are stubbornly resistant to conciliation or compromise, just as we see in America today. Who should be willing to compromise with evil?

Third, the arrival of the Internet, and the resulting decline of mainstream media’s monopoly on the dissemination of ideas and opinions, has done two things: it has brought everyone and everything into immediate contact with everything else, and has dissolved the distinctions between news, opinion, and propaganda. (I remarked at length on some of these effects several years ago, here.) Everything now collides with everything else with zero latency: unfiltered, unvetted, unmediated, and unreflected-upon. This new environment, in combination with universally enfranchised democracy, is the perfect Petri dish for cultivating hasty opinions, emotional responses, mass hysteria, and angry mobs — and those who pull the wires can be counted on to keep their own interests foremost.

Fourth, enormous waves of immigration from alien and incompatible cultures (together with a prevailing ideology in media and the academy that combines identitarian multiculturalism with grievance-mongering against the traditional American nation) has broken down what has always made immigration work in the past — an eagerness to assimilate, to blend into the mainstream national culture. These dislocated immigrants are cultivated as beneficiaries of government largesse, and their votes are counted on to support the growth of the federal Leviathan that nurtures them. Cultural traditionalists in America perceive this as an assault on what they have inherited and hope to preserve. (That they should feel this way about it is, to those on the other side of the Great Fissure, evidence of complete moral dereliction, justifying political and social severities up to and including physical intimidation.)

Finally, technology has made available unprecedented tools for supervision, surveillance, and subversion. These make it possible for the powerful to extend their eyes, ears, and arms in ways that even the most authoritarian tyrants of old could never have dreamt of.

Look at our situation. The media sorts itself into warring camps, jeering and mocking each other and insisting that everything the other side says is a lie. Free speech, and free inquiry, is all but extinct on our campuses; those who question the dogma of our new religion are shouted down and driven off, sometimes violently. Congress is bitterly, implacably divided; legislation proposed by one side is denounced as evil by the other, and is passed only by slim, party-line votes and parliamentary rule-hacking. Elections are bitterly contested, and their results defied; agents of the State itself conspire to rig and overturn them.

The reason we fight so bitterly over Federal power is simple: there’s so much of it that its possession becomes a glittering, and in some ways an existentially necessary, prize.

But — imagine an alternate United States, in which power is distributed in a sort of pyramid, with its base in local governments, and most of the administrative affairs that affect our lives are conducted by our townships, cities, and states. At the apex of this pyramid of power would be a small capstone, located in Washington, concerning itself only with those remote and universal things that involved the union and coordination of the States.

Can you imagine such a thing? The Framers did. They foresaw with a terrible apprehension exactly what befalls us now, and tried to the fullest extent of their genius to bequeath to us a system that would forestall it for as long as possible. But they knew even then that it was beyond hope without comity, commonality, and civic virtue, all of which are now scattered in the whirlwind.

Tonight, all eyes are on the Nunes memo, which seems likely to be released tomorrow. But amid all the smoke and noise, various parties around the Internet have noticed that there may be other things afoot:

It was reported today that the Mueller team has announced that the sentencing of Mike Flynn has been “postponed”, due to the “status of the investigation”.

“Due to the status of the Special Counsel’s investigation, the parties do not believe that this matter is ready to be scheduled for a sentencing hearing at this time,’ the document, signed by Mueller and Flynn attorneys Robert Kelner and Stephen Anthony, said.

“The parties shall file a joint status report by no later than May 1, 2018, stating whether the matter should be scheduled for sentencing or whether a deadline should be set for filing another joint status report,’ said a related order signed by Judge Emmet G. Sullivan.

That’s interesting. Also interesting:

U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia Judge Rudolph Contreras took Flynn’s guilty plea on Dec. 1, 2017 ”“ but just days later, Contreras recused himself from the case.

A court spokesperson told Fox News that the courts do not disclose grounds for recusal.

The exoteric interpretation of this would be that Flynn’s still singing to Mueller about Trump/Russia collusion, and that it’s simply too soon to put the canary in the cage.

But given that all the fuss in Washington right now is about abuse of the FISA court to conduct illegal surveillance of the Trump team, there’s another possibility.

How was attention drawn to Flynn in the first place? By way of the FISA warrant. So here’s the esoteric version of the story:

If Flynn’s conviction depends on evidence gathered by a fraudulently obtained FISA warrant, and Mueller knows it, then Flynn must walk. Moreover, it is only by Flynn’s being charged in the first place with an actual crime that the FISA warrant is forced to come under legal scrutiny — for the possibility that it might be tainted evidence. If Flynn knew all along that illegal surveillance was underway, might he have set a clever trap by making false statements while being recorded, knowing that he was setting himself up to be charged with a “process crime” that would ultimately force the skulduggery out into the open? If this is correct, then it’s a very different set of people who are going to end up in trouble when Mueller finally puts his cards on the table.

Obviously I, an obscure and humble scrivener, have no way of knowing what’s really going on here. But it should be equally obvious that the braying media, on both sides of the aisle, don’t either. I think it’s also very safe to say that there is much, much more to this story than we will every know.

Of this, though, I think we can be sure: the next few weeks and months will not be boring.

Well! It appears the shutdown’s over. (Somehow, the nation survived.)

It would take real determination not to see this as a political win for Donald Trump, and a black eye for Chuck Schumer. As we noted on Friday, the Democrats had three separate chances to make a deal, and there was never anything in the proposed funding bill that Democrats opposed (and the bill did include six years of funding for the children’s health-care program called CHIP). But so rabid are the Democrats’ base that Schumer et al. thought it was in their political interest to dig in their heels*, shut down the government, and blame the Republicans.

The plan to seize and control the narrative failed. The winning message was clear and incontrovertible: the Democrats have now drifted so far left as to be willing to shut down the government — thereby disrupting the lives, security, and household economies of millions of American citizens and service personnel — simply in order to secure benefits for illegal aliens. Moreover, for them to do this after blaming Republicans for “holding America hostage” during the last shutdown a few years ago was obviously and deeply hypocritical. (You can see some accusations of “hostage-taking” on the eve of the previous shutdown, when Republicans were refusing to extend the debt-ceiling unless given legislative concessions, in comments to our own posts, here and here.)

A nasty blow, too, was the viral circulation of this little video from that previous shutdown battle, in 2013:

Realizing their mistake, the Democrats blinked. For this they are already being blasted by their base (which should tell you all you need to know about their base). Now we shall have a three-week postponement, during which there will be “discussions” of what to do about immigration policy.

A plausible compromise, in my opinion, would be:

‣   A limited amnesty for DACA recipients (who may number well more than 800,000, the figure usually given) that would consist of resident status, including permission to work, but not citizenship or voting rights. In order to qualify for full citizenship, they would have to apply individually, like everyone else.

‣   An end to “chain migration” and the “diversity lottery”. (There should be no compromise whatsoever on this.) The visas currently apportioned to the lottery would no longer be issued.

‣   Funding for the Wall.

(This is just the beginning of a rational immigration policy, which should immediately end “birthright citizenship” and obstetrical tourism, and which should sharply curtail legal immigration as well. But I’ll leave that for another post.)

The Democrats won’t agree to this, of course. Why? Because the amnesty described above, despite giving so-called “Dreamers”** what they want most — residency, legitimacy, and the right to work — doesn’t give the Democrats the one thing they really want: millions of new Democratic voters (and millions and millions more, as chain-migration does its ruinous, multiplicative work). DACA recipients would be thrilled if the Democrats accepted such a compromise. The Democrats in Congress, however, couldn’t care less.

This alone should show you that the Democrats’ apparent concern for these people is just a sham. I lived in the U.S. until age 43 without having a vote, and had a perfectly happy life. (I might as well still not have it, too: since becoming naturalized in 1999, nobody I’ve every voted for, with one embarrassing exception, has ever won anything. A universal franchise has nothing to do with good governance, and is arguably its worst enemy.)

So: in three weeks, we are going to be right back in the same place again (minus the six-year funding of CHIP, which was wisely left in the stopgap bill). What will happen? Will the Democrats do the same thing all over again if they don’t get full amnesty, including chain migration? Are they that stupid? (They may very well be.)

Will Congressional Republicans be traitorous enough to grant it? (I certainly hope not — but you never know with these people.) They have the upper hand now, and if they hold firm to something like the compromise outlined above, they can win. And after this, I think they know it.

Above all, Mr. Trump must not waver. I don’t think he will. He knows a winning position when he sees it.

This will turn out, I think, to have been a very important victory — a watershed.
 

* Speaking of digging in the heels, did you know that the word “recalcitrant”, meaning “to be obstinately uncooperative”, has the Latin (perhaps older, maybe Etruscan) root “calx”, meaning “heel”? (It is also the root of the anatomical name of the heel-bone, “calcaneus”.)

** Brilliant propaganda, that word! It is used at every possible opportunity by the media, implanting a tiny partisan brain-worm — an insidious moral-intuition virus — every time readers or viewers absorb it.

Well, another government shutdown looms. The Democrats are refusing to sign on to a budget resolution, because it doesn’t include a “clean” DREAM act.

Over at Hot Air, “Allahpundit” explains:

Let’s run through this again, because job one for Schumer and Pelosi over the next 24 hours will be to muddy waters that are actually quite clear.

First offer from Republicans: Let’s fund the government and pass a DREAM amnesty, as both sides want to do, and in return you give us some concessions on chain migration and the wall. Republicans have no choice but to use DREAM as leverage for those concessions despite their support for the policy because Democrats are incredibly reluctant to tighten admission policies under the best of circumstances. So how about a little something in return for DREAM, in the name of compromise? Nope, says Schumer. Won’t do it. We’ll give you a few billion in mad money for border improvements but we’re not doing anything that might move the U.S. towards skills-based criteria for immigrants and away from “bring the whole family!’ policies.

Second offer from Republicans: Okay, since we’re stuck on a DREAM deal, let’s table the whole immigration issue for now and instead agree to fund the government and extend CHIP long-term, as both sides want to do. We’ll come back to DREAM afterwards when we’re not facing a hard deadline. Nope, says Schumer. Won’t do it. The amnesty fanatics in my base refuse to let us sign on to any funding deal that doesn’t include DREAM. Even though not only is DACA still in effect, the feds are letting enrollees renew their enrollments.

Third offer from Republicans: Okay, since Democrats are hung up on amnesty and worried about voting for a bill that doesn’t include it, let’s temporarily change the rules so that they don’t have to vote for the bill at all. Last night McConnell asked for unanimous consent from the Senate to let Republicans pass a funding bill with 50 votes instead of the 60 that the filibuster requires. It’s not at all certain that he has even 50 votes right now, but he was willing to take full responsibility for the bill’s passage via his caucus alone. If he found the votes he needed, the government would stay open without any Democratic assent to the DREAM-less bill. Nope, said Schumer. Won’t do it. He objected to the motion for unanimous consent. McConnell still needs 60, all but ensuring a shutdown.

Needless to say, the media and the Democrats (but I repeat myself) are presenting this as a Republican shutdown. With tiresome predictability, conscientious voices on the Right are pointing out that the situation is precisely the same as what happened in 2013, with the parties reversed, yet Republicans were blamed for that too.

I say “tiresome predictability” because pointing out double standards like this is not only useless, but deeply misguided. The assumption seems to be that if the Left is shown to be behaving inconsistently, then they will be shamed into standing down. This is wrong on two counts:

First, we are way beyond “shame” here. This is war. The Democrats know this, and have known it for a long, long time.

Second, conservatives and Republicans are looking for consistency in the wrong place. There is in fact a consistent principle, one that is never violated, and it is a simple one:

Attack the enemy always, with whatever weapon comes to hand, and never, never yield an inch.

Once you understand this, everything makes clear and simple sense.