On Liberty Watch

One of the most pernicious notions that has taken hold in modern pop culture is the Nietzschean claim, echoed by the post-modernists, that there are no facts, only interpretations. And since there is no such thing as truth, there is no such thing as right and wrong; there are only preferences. So the choice of Vanilla or Chocolate ice cream is on par with the choice of whether or not to have an abortion.

That this mindset has taken hold can be seen in the common use and abuse of language, something that George Orwell warned about. In the popular culture, modern idioms routinely gloss over substance by muddying the waters all the while disguising the planted axiom. The result is sloppy thinking and mind-numbing conformity.

Consider some phrases that are routinely tossed around in the public discourse. What about “affordable housing” for instance? How about putting a price on a house instead? That is pretty straightforward. But who can afford what is not. I am quite sure Bill Gates and I have very different ideas about what constitutes an affordable house. The planted axiom in the phrase affordable housing is that there is, or ought to be, some floating standard of affordability, determined by bureaucrats (experts) to determine who will benefit from their munificence with other people’s money.

Similarly, the phrase “pro-choice” (“pro-life” is the other side of the same coin) really means being in favor of a legal right to abortion on demand. That it has nothing to do with being in favor of maximizing consumer choice is made clear by the vociferous opposition to charter schools by “pro-choice” groups. Related dodges include referring to abortion rights as women’s health “issues”.

These understatements are simply designed to avoid the underlying substance of the issues involved. But while it may be easy to avoid the underlying issues of any given dispute by resorting to euphemisms the facts on the ground create a culture of, if not acceptance, at least acquiescence. And it becomes progressively easier to resort to euphemism, then spin—itself a euphemism—and a host of other subject switching and issue reframing devices to avoid the plain truth.

White House Credibility—or the Lack of It

Which brings us to the latest round of wounds the White House has managed to inflict on itself. The star of the show, naturally enough, is Donald Trump, whose mastery of the art of forming a rapid-fire circular firing squad is unparalleled in modern political history.

In rapid succession the Trump White House asserted that (1) the President fired Jim Comey (who should have been fired months ago) because of the way he handled the Clinton e-mail investigation, only to be undercut shortly thereafter by (2) Trump himself. Trump went on to national television and announced he was going to fire Comey anyway because he was thinking of “this Russia thing” not to mention that (Comey) was a show boater.

As if this were not bad enough, within a day or two, the Washington Post (and then the NY Times and the Wall Street Journal) got leaks to the effect that Trump revealed “highly classified” information about ISIS to a Russian diplomat. The source of the intelligence was reported to be Israel, which means that Trump may have compromised Israeli sources and methods. The response of the White House communications amateurs, now crouched in fetal position, was to send out General Bruce McMaster to argue that Trump didn’t do what he wasn’t accused of. But then Trump himself seemed to confirm the essence of the story by Tweeting (of course) that he had every right to share information with leaders of foreign governments.

While it may be true that Trump can declassify anything he wants, it is worth noting that, if the reporting is correct, he shared the information with the Russian diplomat, but there is no indication that he actually declassified it. Also worth noting is that while General McMaster tried to defend Trump by saying that Trump didn’t say anything “inappropriate” McMaster also intimated that it is possible that Trump may not have understood the security implications of what he said. That by the way is the Clinton non-defense defense—there was no intent to harm the U.S.

But wait, there’s more. Naturally enough, it has to do with the Comey – Trump grudge match. Apparently James Comey made a practice of taking copious notes of his meetings after which he wrote memos to the file about them when he suspected problems could emerge. (Note here: It would be interesting to see Comey’s contemporaneous notes concerning the Clinton e-mail investigation). Anyway, an anonymous FBI associate of Comey’s reportedly read a Comey memo to the file to a Washington Post reporter. According to the Post, Trump asked Comey to lay off investigating Mike Flynn with respect to Flynn’s Russian ties. The White House denies it.

Now the words Obstruction of Justice and Impeachment are getting tossed around Washington, sometimes with glee, sometimes with fear.

Enter Robert Mueller

Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, author of the blistering memo that recommended the dismissal of Director Comey has now appointed former FBI Director Robert S. Mueller as a “special counsel” with a broad mandate to take charge of the whole Russian / collusion investigation. It is important to note that Mueller’s title is special counsel. He has not been appointed as an independent prosecutor primarily because there is no such thing in the American legal / political system. All prosecutorial power lies in the Executive Branch and the President is its most senior officer.

To the extent that Mueller is independent, it is a function of his personal reputation for integrity. He is not structurally or legally independent. He can be fired by the President at-will. But there would be a political price to pay were he to do so, as Nixon found out when he fired Archibald Cox.

The State of Play

What to make of all this? With respect to the various charges and denials vis-à-vis (1) Trump asking Comey to put the Russia / Flynn investigation aside, and (2) revealing highly classified information to a hostile foreign power, somebody is lying, which of course implies that there actually is such a thing as truth.

Consider possibility #1: The press, meaning the Washington Post, The New York Times, the Washington Post and NBC News are making all this stuff up, or have been collectively hoodwinked by anonymous sources. Nobody this side of sanity believes this. Are the leakers cherry-picking materials designed to maximize political damage to the Trump Administration and possibly bring it down? Probably. Are the leaks essentially accurate? Probably yes, the leaks are essentially accurate.

Let’s consider possibility #2, which is a much better bet. The leaks are essentially accurate. Trump gave a Russian diplomat highly classified intelligence information, and in so doing he may have compromised Israeli (and possibly U.S.) sources and methods. Moreover, in the process he jeopardized the lives of agents in the field. Trump may be within his rights to do this, as he argued on Twitter, but that doesn’t make it smart. In fact, it is incredibly reckless. Trump basically guaranteed that no ally will want to share intelligence with the U.S. while Trump sits in the Oval Office.

Moreover it is almost certainly true that Comey kept contemporaneous notes designed to cast himself in the most flattering light. Which also means that there is almost certainly a Comey memo to the file in which he portrays himself as a hero fending off pressure from Trump to drop the Russia / Flynn investigation. Now that Robert Mueller has been appointed special counsel, these (and other) memos and documents will surely be subpoenaed and will make their way into the public record.

What Next?

Game theorists will quickly recognize the set of developing incentive structures faced by the players. Flynn wants to avoid prosecution. Trump wants to save his Presidency. Flynn’s attorney asked for immunity a while ago to clearly signal that his client had no intention of being a sacrificial lamb for Trump. In response Trump asked Comey to lay off the investigation. This is a coordination maneuver designed to circumvent the problem of the prisoner’s dilemma that Trump and Flynn find themselves in.

The naming of Mueller as special counsel puts an end to coordination maneuvers of this sort. Now it will be every man for himself, and that does not bode well for Trump. (An interesting side note is that the Clintons routinely found themselves in these sorts of predicaments so they typically got all the potential defendants on the same page by using a joint defense so they could coordinate through their lawyers. See for instance, the arrangement with Hillary Clinton and Cheryl Mills in the e-mail mail scandal. Also the Clintons paid the legal fees of the guy who set up the server.)

In the end this is not going to end well for Trump. Flynn is likely to give testimony that is damaging to Trump in order to save his own hide. He may just turn out to be the John Dean of 2017. The fat lady may not be singing yet, but she is clearing her throat.

Conservatives Trade Principle for Power

In what seems like a very long time ago in a far-away land, Conservatives read people like Edmund Burke and Alexis de Tocqueville and used to argue that character mattered. Along the way, roughly corresponding to the time Trump decided to run for President, they caught the same disease that afflicts Progressives. They know what’s best for you. And so with a deeply flawed candidate they decided that character wasn’t so important after all.

In seeking power at any price “conservatives” threw Conservatism overboard to make a Faustian bargain with Donald Trump. And just 4 months in, it is becoming increasingly clear just how steep the price is ultimately going to be. You can bet that the groundwork is already being prepared for the attack on Mueller’s integrity if he doesn’t find an impeachable offense, pretty much the way the Clinton’s attacked Ken Starr. And they are going to begin roughing up Mike Pence to weaken him if he ascends to the Presidency by virtue of a successful impeachment effort.

And Trump supporting conservatives have no one to blame but for all this but themselves.

JFB

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For lots of very good reasons, not the least of which is that he is—let us face it—an ignoramus, an awful lot of people find Donald Trump’s election to be simply unpalatable. Within this group are two distinct camps. There are the adults who will use checks and balances in the way they were intended. And then there are the Democrats, currently led by Tom Perez, former Obama Administration Labor Secretary.

Meet the New Chair of the DNC
Tom Perez, now Chairman of the DNC, gave a speech in Newark, NJ the other day in which he asserted among other things that (1) Donald Trump did not win the 2016 Presidential election, (2) the marches that followed i.e.—the “Resistance”—are far more important, and (3) “the GOP doesn’t give a shit about people”. Thus far no Democrats have come forward to disagree with Perez or at least give him a primer on how the Electoral College works.

Most amazing of all, the people who sponsored Perez’s speech seem to be quite pleased with themselves over the whole affair. They have proudly posted his performance on the Facebook page of NJ Working Families. The part of the video showing Perez’s rant, taken with a hand held camera, is about 24 minutes or so into the tape. It can be seen below.

https://www.facebook.com/njworkingfamilies/videos/10154214233181784/

Susan Rice…Again
In the meantime, Susan Rice, who made her last appearance as the Obama Administration’s designated liar in the Benghazi Affair, is once again in the news. It turns out that she was the Obama Administration official who was responsible for requesting the “unmasking” of the identities of Trump associates whose communications were “incidentally” intercepted as a result of of NSA surveillance of foreign nationals. Whether the interceptions truly were “incidental” or a political bank shot remains to be seen.

Chuck Schumer as Otter
Not to be outdone, there is Chuck Schumer, who appears ready to filibuster the nomination of Gorsuch knowing full well there is virtually no chance it will succeed in derailing Gorsuch’s march to the Supreme Court. In this, his behavior is remarkably similar to Otter’s in that American classic, Animal House. When Otter realizes how dire their fraternity’s situation is, he demands one “futile and stupid gesture” of defiance.

Schumer’s gesture will however prompt Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to trigger the nuclear option on Supreme Court nominees, eliminating the de facto 60-vote requirement for confirmation. It will likely not apply to legislation.

But contrary to popular belief, the filibuster itself will not actually be eliminated. Any Senator will be able to take the floor and speak forever in order to delay a vote. This is actually a sensible result. The point of the filibuster was to force debate by allowing the minority to make its case. It was not supposed to be a way to create a requirement for a super-majority that was not already required by the Constitution. And as for Senator Schumer’s insistence that there really is a 60-vote tradition for confirming Supreme Court justices, there is the fact that Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito were confirmed with 52 and 58 votes respectively.

Schumer, who graduated from Harvard Law School, argues that Gorsuch is “out of the mainstream” because he allegedly has a history of siding with powerful corporations rather than “the little guy”. It does make you wonder though which of Schumer’s law school professors taught him that judges were supposed to look at the litigants respective balance sheets before deciding a case.

Leaving that aside, since Schumer is so enamored of “the mainstream” it does raise the interesting question of what the Senator from New York thinks the mainstream represents. And now we have a hint, brought to us by none other than Tom Perez, the Chairman of the Democratic Party’s organizational arm. Senator Schumer, who has yet to dispute Perez’s rather bizarre claims, apparently thinks that the mainstream doesn’t know who won the 2016 Presidential election and prefers mob rule to elections.

Thankfully, it is hard to imagine we have driven so far off the rails that anyone serious takes these people seriously.

JFB

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Devin Nunes, a Republican, a Trump supporter and Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee previously said (and continues to say) that he doesn’t see any evidence that Trump Tower was wiretapped by the Obama Administration. There appears to be unanimity on that point, taken very literally. But now, according to Nunes, new evidence has surfaced indicating that on numerous occasions, personal communications of U.S. citizens involved in the Trump transition were indeed intercepted by U.S. intelligence. Moreover, the information apparently had little or no foreign policy value, and was unrelated to the Russia investigation. Not only that, according to Nunes it seems that details about the individuals caught up in this net were widely distributed to players in the intelligence “community.”

Prior to the delivery of Nunes’s bombshell, James Comey had testified before the House Intelligence Committee the day before. In that testimony, Comey said that the FBI “was investigating the nature of the links between individuals associated with the Trump campaign and the Russian government, and whether there was any coordination between the campaign and Russia’s efforts”. A major focus of the hearing was on whether there was evidence that the prior Administration had “wiretapped” Trump during the campaign, a charge made several weeks ago by His Excellency. On Twitter of course. Under questioning Comey said “I have no information that supports those tweets, and we have looked carefully inside the FBI.”

Up until Nunes press conference, with the Comey testimony in hand, the story line peddled by the “Resistance” was (1) that there is no possibility that Trump and Co. were subjected to surveillance by “the intelligence community” and (2) the Trump campaign colluded with Vladimir Putin to swing the election.

Let’s unpack all this. It is perfectly obvious that Comey’s statement is about as meaningless as it gets. And that is being charitable. Comey says he has no information that supports Trump’s Tweets after looking carefully inside the FBI. Big Deal. Suppose the information is at the NSA or the CIA? Or suppose a rogue agent somewhere decided to conduct surveillance of Trump and Co. but decided not to write a memo about it and send it to the New York Times? And how did the “intelligence community” get the information that sunk Mike Flynn, anyway?

Leave all that aside for now. Comey testified that the FBI was conducting what amounts to a counter-intelligence investigation that included the Trump campaign. How is it even possible for the FBI to run a counter-intelligence investigation of the Trump campaign and not conduct surveillance of said campaign? It is simply beyond belief. And if this is how the FBI manages counter-intelligence activities, we might as well ask the KGB if they’d like to set up an office at the Pentagon.

In the meantime Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) has effectively charged Trump and his associates with treason in a way that would make Joe McCarthy proud. According to Politicus USA, Schiff “…laid out all of the important “coincidences” involved in the Trump campaign’s relationship with Russia. He asked, “Is it possible that all of these events and reports are completely unrelated and nothing more than an entirely unhappy coincidence? Yes. It is possible, but it is also possible, maybe more than possible, that they are not coincidental, not disconnected, and not unrelated, and the Russians used the same techniques to corrupt US persons that they employed in Europe and elsewhere. We simply don’t know, and we owe it to the country to find out.”

Some of Schiff’s performance can be seen below.

There was a time a long ago (pre 1992) when politicians at least pretended to be embarrassed when they got caught telling the inevitable whopper. They also at least hesitated before charging the other side with being a tool of a foreign power, sans evidence. Not anymore. That is exactly what Schiff and Co are doing with lots of innuendo and zero evidence.

When Politics is Everything

We now we have the politicization of just about everything. It is accompanied by a destructive tribalism that leaves no stone unturned. The personal is the political. So political opponents are not merely those with whom you disagree about some issues. They are the enemy and must be crushed at all costs, using any method.

So it becomes OK to lie. Because so many have adopted Nietzsche’s nihilism: there are no facts, only interpretations. Norms of decency and civility are taken as signs of weakness. The institutions of civil society are increasingly under attack by radicals and campus book burners who willingly use violence, and who fear no sanction for doing so.What matters is the will to power.

The irony is that Vladimir Putin didn’t need to meddle in our elections to try to weaken freedom and democracy. Our own pusillanimous politicians are doing that all by themselves.

JFB

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