Bernie Must Be Feeling Extra Foolish

Democrats, Elections, Hillary Clinton

“You’ve got a situation here where the woman [Hillary Clinton] who would be in charge of setting national security policy as president has been deemed by the F.B.I. unsuitable to safeguard and handle classified information.”—Washington lawyer specializing in security clearances, New York Times:

Though Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch formally affirmed on Wednesday that the Justice Department would not seek criminal charges against anyone in the email case, fallout from the matter is sure to affect several dozen State Department advisers who, records show, facilitated Mrs. Clinton’s unorthodox email arrangement or used it to send her classified documents.
Among those drawing the most intense scrutiny are Cheryl Mills, Huma Abedin and Jake Sullivan, onetime aides who could face difficult questions in pursuing security clearances for diplomatic or national security posts because of their involvement with Mrs. Clinton’s emails. (… MORE)

Even the NYT can no longer ignore Clinton’s stupid conduct. I bet Bernie Sanders is feeling like an even bigger fool than he is for papering over his rival’s rotten judgment.

“In the first Democratic debate, presidential candidate Bernie Sanders said people are sick of hearing about Hillary Clinton’s ‘damn emails.” Sanders might have had a chance against the Clinton Machine had he driven home the “bad judgment” point. Instead, he spent the primaries obsequiously apologizing to her highness like the mouse he is.

Let’s Have Leniency For Ordinary Americans Imprisoned By The Security State

Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, Homeland Security

The good news is that Hillary Clinton is finished as a presidential candidate (unless I’ve failed to factor in the voting power of the resentful minorities that flank her and Barack Obama on their campaign excursions). The more like a banana republic the American political and justice systems show themselves to be—the greater Donald Trump’s chances of becoming president.

Again and again has FBI Director James Comey, “an Obama appointee who served in the Bush DOJ” (and who used to get his best daily boosting from Sean Hannity), revealed himself as a weasel. As recent events have demonstrated, Comey has an abysmal record of stopping American Jihadists, but has vigorously prosecuted innocents (in natural law) such as Martha Stewart.

“Washington Has Been Obsessed With Punishing Secrecy Violations — until Hillary Clinton,” writes Glenn Greenwald, in this characteristically excellent analysis:

Secrecy is a virtual religion in Washington. Those who violate its dogma have been punished in the harshest and most excessive manner – at least when they possess little political power or influence. As has been widely noted, the Obama administration has prosecuted more leakers under the 1917 Espionage Act than all prior administrations combined. Secrecy in DC is so revered that even the most banal documents are reflexively marked classified, making their disclosure or mishandling a felony. As former CIA and NSA Director Michael Hayden said back in 2000, “Everything’s secret. I mean, I got an email saying ‘Merry Christmas.’ It carried a top secret NSA classification marking.”

People who leak to media outlets for the selfless purpose of informing the public – Daniel Ellsberg, Tom Drake, Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden – face decades in prison. Those who leak for more ignoble and self-serving ends – such as enabling hagiography (Leon Panetta, David Petreaus) or ingratiating oneself to one’s mistress (Petraeus) – face career destruction, though they are usually spared if they are sufficiently Important-in-DC. For low-level, powerless Nobodies-in-DC, even the mere mishandling of classified information – without any intent to leak but merely to, say, work from home – has resulted in criminal prosecution, career destruction and the permanent loss of security clearance.

This extreme, unforgiving, unreasonable, excessive posture toward classified information came to an instant halt in Washington today – just in time to save Hillary Clinton’s presidential aspirations. FBI Director James Comey, an Obama appointee who served in the Bush DOJ, held a press conference earlier this afternoon in which he condemned Clinton on the ground that she and her colleagues were “extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information,” including Top Secret material.

Comey also detailed that her key public statements defending her conduct – i.e., she never sent classified information over her personal email account and that she had turned over all “work-related” emails to the State Department – were utterly false; insisted “that any reasonable person in Secretary Clinton’s position . . . should have known that an unclassified system was no place for that conversation”; and argued that she endangered national security because of the possibility “that hostile actors gained access to Secretary Clinton’s personal e-mail account.” Comey also noted that others who have done what Clinton did “are often subject to security or administrative sanctions” – such as demotion, career harm, or loss of security clearance.

Despite all of these highly incriminating findings, Comey explained, the FBI is recommending to the Justice Department that Clinton not be charged with any crime. “Although there is evidence of potential violations of the statutes regarding the handling of classified information,” he said, “our judgment is that no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case.” To justify this claim, Comey cited “the context of a person’s actions” and her “intent.” In other words, there is evidence that she did exactly what the criminal law prohibits, but it was more negligent and careless than malicious and deliberate. …

.… MORE.

A July 4th Toast To Thomas Jefferson, Author of The Declaration

America, Constitution, Founding Fathers, History, IMMIGRATION

For most, Independence Day means firecrackers and cookouts. “The Declaration of Independence—whose proclamation, on July 4, 1776, we celebrate—doesn’t feature. To be fair to the liberal establishment, ordinary Americans are not entirely blameless. In fact, contemporary Americans are less likely to read it now that it is easily available on the Internet, than when it relied on horseback riders for its distribution.”

Back in 1776, gallopers carried the Declaration through the country. Printer John Dunlap had worked ‘through the night’ to set the full text on ‘a handsome folio sheet,’ recounts historian David Hackett Fischer in Liberty And Freedom. And President (of the Continental Congress) John Hancock urged that the “people be universally informed.”

Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration, called it ‘an expression of the American Mind.’ An examination of Jefferson’s constitutional thought makes plain that he would no longer consider the mind of a Mitt Romney, Barack Obama, or the collective mentality of the liberal establishment, ‘American’ in any meaningful way. For the Jeffersonian mind was that of an avowed Whig—an American Whig whose roots were in the English Whig political philosophy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. …

… Jefferson’s muse for the ‘American Mind’ is even older.

The Whig tradition is undeniably Anglo-Saxon. Our founding fathers’ political philosophy originated with their Saxon forefathers, and the ancient rights guaranteed by the Saxon constitution. With the Declaration, Jefferson told Henry Lee in 1825, he was also protesting England’s violation of her own ancient tradition of natural rights. As Jefferson saw it, the Colonies were upholding a tradition the Crown had abrogated. …

Naturally, Jefferson never entertained the folly that he was of immigrant stock. He considered the English settlers of America courageous conquerors, much like his Saxon forebears, to whom he compared them. To Jefferson, early Americans were the contemporary carriers of the Anglo-Saxon project.”

The original Independence-Day column in its entirety is “A July 4th Toast To Thomas Jefferson And The Anglo-Saxon Tradition.”

Certain Americans will never own the founding history of this country and one of perhaps three just wars Americans have fought.

In 2012, the foul-mouthed Chris Rock called July 4th “Happy white peoples independence day.”

Americans No Longer Have The Money, But Brexiter Brits Still Have The Brains

Britain, English, EU, Europe, Free Markets, Ilana Mercer, Intelligence, Journalism, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Nationhood

The new book, “The Trump Revolution: The Donald’s Creative Destruction Deconstructed,” is available on Amazon. The new column, “Americans No Longer Have ‘the Money,’ But Brexiter Brits Still Have ‘the Brains,’” is excerpted below:

During the Bretton Woods Conference, in 1944, Lord Halifax is said to have “whispered to Lord Keynes: ‘It’s true: they have the money bags but we have all the brains.’” By “they,” Halifax meant the Americans.

His frustration with the American mind—often prosaic and anti-intellectual—during the critical Bretton-Woods negotiations seems as valid today. As odious as Britain’s elites are; boy, are they cleverer than ours. Take the impromptu interview, on June 28, which Richard Quest, CNN’s imported British broadcast journalist, conducted with Nigel Farage, leader of the UK Independence Party.

Farage had emerged exhilarated from the coven that is the European Parliament, where he had shared some home truths with the ponces leeching off Britain.

Other than to mouth formulaically about “small government, big military, balanced budgets and the penny plan”—America’s chattering class and ruling elites seem incapable of expressing the principles undergirding freedom. And members of this political Idiocracy dissolve into a puddle if their cue cards disappear.

Farage, however, spoke to some difficult ideas with ease, and without notes.

The act of secession, the quests for sovereignty, decentralization and regional autonomy from a second tier of tyrants—the first being the national, British government—involve comprehending complicated ideas.

About this, Milton Friedman forewarned in the introduction to F.A. Hayek’s “The Road to Serfdom.” Whereas “the argument for collectivism is simple if false; it is an immediate emotional argument.” “The argument for individualism” and freedom, on the other hand, “is subtle and sophisticated; it is an indirect rational argument.”

Put differently: If you can’t express the principles of liberty, can you properly pursue them? Will you not forgo them?

It’s difficult for dummies to understand liberty, let alone defend it, a problem the scintillating, cerebral Mr. Farage doesn’t have.

“You as a political project are in denial,” he told the grumbling laggards in the EU chamber. The EU had, “by stealth by deception, and without ever telling the truth to the British and European people, imposed political union upon them.”

Not to be trusted, EU advocate Segolene Royal, French environment minister and former socialist candidate for the French presidency, praised this coerced union, calling it a “family.” “The family is supposed to have a say in when a member leaves,” she griped to BBC’s tough talker, Stephen Sackur.

The sort of family Royal describes is known as La Familia, a crime family that knee caps you if you leave.

Heckling Eurocrats were reminded by Farage that when, in 2005, the people of the Netherlands and France said adieu to an enforced political union—the Eurocrats had “ignored them and brought in the Lisbon Treaty through the backdoor.” Indeed, the last refuge of a Brussels scoundrel is the bureaucracy. When voters scuttled the EU Constitution in that referenda; the rogues being upbraided by Farage dissolved one illegitimate political structure and constituted another.

“You’re in denial,” continued Farage, “about Mrs. Merkel’s invitation to any and all to cross the Mediterranean and enter the EU, all of which has led to massive divisions between and within countries.”

What the little people did, what the ordinary people did, what the people who’ve been oppressed have done is to reject the multinationals, reject the merchant banks, reject Big Politics, and demand their country back, their fishing waters back, their borders back. We want to be an independent self-governing nation. [If anything], we offer a beacon of hope. The UK will not be the last member state to leave the EU.

A series of similar watersheds would follow, predicted Farage.

Fleetingly, at least, Farage’s fluency with the ideas of freedom took effect. The blank faces flanking UKIP’s leader looked somewhat animated. Fewer jeered; some even clapped and cheered as Farage went on to submit that no stalling would be tolerated. The will of the British people would be heeded forthwith. Called for was “a grown-up and sensible attitude” toward executing popular—in this case, naturally licit—wishes.

Mr. Farage was not done, …

… Read the complete column, “Americans No Longer Have ‘the Money,’ But Brexiter Brits Still Have ‘the Brains,’” on the Unz Review. The book, “The Trump Revolution: The Donald’s Creative Destruction Deconstructed,” you’ll need to purchase.