Presidents Downed by Office Seekers

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If only

For John, BLUF:  Alternative history is fun fiction, but a bad analytic tool.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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Here is the Blog Post, but this post is about one of the comments:

"Had Fox News existed — and been essentially the state-run TV — during the Nixon era, there might not have been an impeachment of Richard Nixon."

Said Adam Schiff on Bill Maher's show last night.

That is the total blog post by Professor Althouse.

Here is one of the 208 Comments to date:

Had the allied Greek forces not defeated the Persians at Plataea and Mycale, history might have been quite different.

Of course, the Greeks defeating the Persians is emblematic of White Patriarchal Oppression and White Supremacy.

Naturally. 2/10/18, 1:48 PM

(Battle of Plataea (479 BC) and Battle of Mycale, the same day.)

Exactly.  Well, except the word is "Caucasian".

Hat tip to Ann Althouse.

Regards  —  Cliff
-2, Thu 3.0

Surveillance Within Trump Tower

For John, BLUF:  Of course there was, but who cares now?  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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Here is the short form version of the story.

Tucker Carlson: "Patronizing Assurances That No One Was Spying On Political Campaigns Were False, Probably Intentionally So"

This is from Real Clear Politics and Reporter Tim Hains, posted 20 September 2017.  It includes a video.

Here is the lede plus three:

According to a new report from CNN, Paul Manafort, who for a time last year was the Trump campaign chairman, was indeed wiretapped by the federal government, both before and after the election.

Manafort, it ought to be noted, had an apartment inside Trump Tower at that time, so it is virtually certain that surveillance of him would have included other members of the Trump campaign staff, maybe even Trump himself.  In other words, it looks like Trump's tweet may have been right.  So why did three top members of Congress from both parties, and the country's top law enforcement officers all assure us that the surveillance didn't happen?  That there wasn't a shred of evidence to suggest it had happened? Were they lying or did tey simply not know?

Neither answer is comforting.

Either the intelligence agency has gone rogue, pursuing its own goals without meaningful oversight from elected officials, or, our elected officials are colluding with each other to lie to the public, apparently for political reasons.

Don't you wish Richard Nixon was still in the White House?  If he was this would are a major scandal.

Here is the long form version of the story.

WHY OBAMA REALLY SPIED ON TRUMP

The sub-headline is:

Obama had to spy on Trump to protect himself.

From Front Page Magazine and Writer Daniel Greenfield, it has a dateline of 20 September 2017.

The lede and a few:

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical left and Islamic terrorism.

Last week, CNN revealed (and excused) one phase of the Obama spying operation on Trump.  After lying about it on MSNBC, Susan Rice admitted unmasking the identities of Trump officials to Congress.

Rice was unmasking the names of Trump officials a month before leaving office.  The targets may have included her own successor, General Flynn, who was forced out of office using leaked surveillance.

While Rice’s targets weren’t named, the CNN story listed a meeting with Flynn, Bannon and Kushner.

Bannon was Trump’s former campaign chief executive and a senior adviser.  Kushner is a senior adviser.  Those are exactly the people you spy on to get an insight into what your political opponents plan to do.

Now the latest CNN spin piece informs us that secret FISA orders were used to spy on the conversations of Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort.  The surveillance was discontinued for lack of evidence and then renewed under a new warrant.  This is part of a pattern of FISA abuses by Obama Inc. which never allowed minor matters like lack of evidence to dissuade them from new FISA requests.

Desperate Obama cronies had figured out that they could bypass many of the limitations on the conventional investigations of their political opponents by ‘laundering’ them through national security.

I am hoping the current Ken Burns series on Viet-nam will talk about the Domestic Spying that went on in the 1960s and early 1970s.  Things covered by the Church Committee.  Then there was the veneer of national security.  Today it is just politics.♠

Hat tip to the InstaPundit.

Regards  —  Cliff

♠  I wonder if Mrs Clinton thinks back to her time on the Senate Watergate Committee as a staffer and thinks about how wrong President Nixon was, or if she thinks that he was just wrong to get caught.

Defensive Crouch

For John, BLUF:  The cover-up is always worse than the crime.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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Hillary Clinton was right about the vast right-wing conspiracy.  Here’s why it exists.

From Reporter Karen Tumulty and The Wash Post.

Here is a key point made by Mr David Gergen:

“I believe that decision against disclosure was the decisive turning point.  If they had turned over the Whitewater documents to The Washington Post in December 1993, their seven-year-old land deal would have soon disappeared as an issue and the story of the next seven years would have been entirely different,” Gergen wrote in his book about his time working for four presidents, from Nixon to Clinton.

Then he adds this point, which rings true:

“She has built a protective shield around herself,” Gergen added. “Her first response is, when people come after me, I’m going to have my guard up and be suspicious of what their motives are.”

The article ends on this note:

Clinton drew the opposite lesson from those early Whitewater experiences — one that also shapes how she operates today.

Her view was that she should have thrown up more resistance.

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton appears to have learned nothing from the Watergate imbroglio.

I believe Ms Clinton lacks the temperament to handle the job of President.  I hope she listens to her Advisors and her Husband.

Hat tip to Memeorandum.

Regards  —  Cliff

Ms Clinton Tries Fog

For John, BLUF:  Admit it and move on.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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Hillary Clinton’s Reaction to Her Foundation Scandal Is Disastrous

Miss Elise Jordan,♠ of NBC, got an item in Time, a couple of days ago.

Here is the sub-headline:

'It's not only about what the Clintons did, but how they react'

So, the story starts out with a personal remembrance:

I recently sliced the tip of my toe on an ocean barnacle.  This happened at 6pm on a Friday of a long-awaited beach weekend, so I avoided the emergency room for stitches.

Overdosing on rosé was no cure.  My minor wound kept bleeding.  I finally went to the doctor when I got home where I got crutches, antibiotics for the infection, and an avoidable weeklong recovery for a tiny cut, for no reason other than my bullheadedness.

As I watch Hillary Clinton wish away the fallout of the Clinton Foundation’s unseemly ties with the State Department during her tenure as Secretary of State, I can’t help but think that her self-inflicted wound just bleeds and bleeds and bleeds.  Every day that she fails to seriously address the rotten consequences of her poor judgment, Clinton further erodes the already lacking public trust in her.  By avoiding a sincere display of contrition, she risks her candidacy and the foundation her family built.

Does no one on the Clinton team remember the aphorism "It's not the crime, it's the coverup"?

Had young Lawyer Clinton left the the Watergate Committee, and Washington, before we learned that lesson?

Ms Clinton brings all the paranoia of Richard Nixon, but without the Foreign Policy acumen.

Hat tip to the Breitbart.

Regards  —  Cliff

♠  "Elise Jordan is an NBC News/MSNBC political analyst. She has worked for the Department of State and the National Security Council."

"Lost" Records

For John, BLUF:  Surveillance is pervasive.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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Can anyone explain what is really going on here?  From ars technica we have this headline:  "Judge allows US Marshals’ seizure of stingray♠ records, demises lawsuit:  What began as request for info on cell tracking records turns into surreal tale."

Is it just this Administration that is hiding records?  I doubt it, but there is the quip from George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley:  “Barack Obama is really the President Richard Nixon always wanted to be.”

Regards  —  Cliff

♠  From Wikipedia, "A stingray is a controversial electronic surveillance device for remotely capturing data from mobile telephones."