Congressional Bailout: President Trump Drop Kicks The CCPVirus "Relief" Can Down The Road

In keeping with the prevailing attitudes for 2020, President Trump has extended the bailout philosophy to the United States Congress, effectively taking them off the hook for a potentially disastrous second crash of the economy by letting key provisions of March's CARES Act expire.

After a week of stalled negotiations between the White House and Congressional Democrats over such relief measures as the eviction moratorium (which expired on July 25) and the FPUC stipend of $600 per week (which expired on July 31), President Trump signed a series of Executive Orders to unilaterally address these items.

The new orders will:

• Eliminate the payroll tax
• Extend unemployment benefits by $400 per week, down from $600
• Defer student loan repayments through the end of the year
• Extend protections against evictions

Democrats Cry "Foul"

In a move that surprised exactly no one, the Democrats reacted with their reflexive high dudgeon over all things Trump. 

“This is not presidential leadership. These orders are not real solutions,” said presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden. “They are just another cynical ploy designed to deflect responsibility. Some measures do far more harm than good.”

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) and Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) called on Trump and Republicans to return to the negotiating table to work out a bill.

“We’re disappointed that instead of putting in the work to solve Americans’ problems, the president instead chose to stay on his luxury golf course to announce unworkable, weak and narrow policy announcements to slash the unemployment benefits that millions desperately need and endanger seniors’ Social Security and Medicare,” the Democratic leaders said in a statement. The payroll taxes Trump targeted fund Social Security and Medicare.

In doing so, the Democrats employed a staple of modern political rhetoric: fuzzy math. It is at the very least disingenuous to accuse President Trump of "slashing" unemployment benefits when his Executive Order means that Federal Pandemic Unemployment Compensation recipients will be receiving $400 more next week than they did last week. The unmentioned conceit is that, since the FPUC stipend had already expired, one full week of benefits were paid out without the $600 stipend that had been included in the CARES Act passed earlier in the year.

With as many as 30 million unemployed Americans receiving compensation, the expiration of the stipend amounted to the abrupt withdrawal of $18 billion in consumer spending from the American economy. For those wishing an example of the term "demand shock", such a drop-off in spending is exactly that.

The Democrats are also conveniently ignoring the 2.3 million Americans suddenly at risk of eviction for unpaid rents, once the CARES eviction moratorium expired. President Trump's Executive Orders restored the moratorium for the time being.

While Executive Orders are not at all any form of permanent resolution to these isues, the Democrats claim that Trump has "slashed" benefits is politely described as "horse hockey."

Republicans Discover The Constitution

In a move that will also shock no one, Senate Republicans are fretting over the Constitutionality of the President's Executive Orders.

Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Nebr.), who has largely spoken out against the government spending large sums of money in coronavirus legislation, offered one of the party's more cutting rebukes, calling the theory behind the move "unconstitutional slop."

"The pen-and-phone theory of executive lawmaking is unconstitutional slop," Sasse said in a statement issued by email and obtained by The Hill. "President Obama did not have the power to unilaterally rewrite immigration law with DACA, and President Trump does not have the power to unilaterally rewrite the payroll tax law."

While the good Senator's criticisms are not entirely without merit, they lack a certain moral gravitas given Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell's willingness to take a back seat in negotiations with Congressional Democrats, preferring the Trump Administration to do all the heavy lifting.

"Wherever this thing settles between the president of the United States and his team that have to sign it into law, and the Democrat -- not insignificant minority in the Senate and the majority in the House -- is something I'm prepared to support, even if I have some problems with certain parts of it," Republican McConnell told reporters on Capitol Hill.

Nor is it as if President Trump did not telegraph this move well in advance. In the middle of last week, with negotiations at a standstill, Trump said he was looking at doing these measures via Executive Order if the Democrats did not bend and negotiate in good faith, and that was an escalation of his earlier rhetoric about using Executive Orders to address the eviction moratorium, about which he made his position quite clear:

"I could do that if I want, and I want to do that. I don’t want people to be evicted," Trump told reporters about whether he would suspend evictions. A federal moratorium on evictions, which was passed in March’s CARES Act, expired last month.

Regardless of the Constitutionality and legality of the President's Executive Orders, the Republicans had ample time to both a) register their objections to them, and b) craft an actual piece of compromise legislation with the Democrats. They declined to take either option seriously.

A Win, Politically

As alternative-media commentator Mike Cernovich observed after the orders were signed, the move was a clear political win for Donald Trump:

Congress doesn’t want to govern. Trump can lose in court on these EOs. That doesn’t matter.

When Trump waits on Mitch or blames ”do nothing Democrats,” he looks weak. 

When he governs and gets hit by court, looks heroic. 

The fight is what counts.

— Cernovich (@Cernovich) August 9, 2020

There is little doubt that Trump's political base is energized and encouraged by the executive orders, and there is equally little doubt that Congressional Democrats have few good options available to oppose them. The simple mathematics of the orders is that, regardless of Constitutional strictures, forcing the orders to be rescinded is tantamount to subjecting over 2 million Americans to imminent eviction and snatching $400 per week out of the hands of every unemployed person in the country. Optically, that puts the Democrats in the position of "slashing" benefits.

Moreover, as Cernovich points out, even a rebuke by the courts can be a political win for President Trump. In the wake of Chief Justice John Roberts' undeniably politicized ruling aborting President Trump's efforts to end Barack Obama's unconstitutional DACA program, President Trump's voter base is quite willing to believe the Supreme Court is a nakedly political body, and not a neutral arbiter of the Constitution. A rebuke from the Supreme Court would be received by many Trump supporters as yet another case the Court got completely wrong.

President Trump ran as a populist, and his rhetoric has been steadfastly populist. Regardless of their legality, it should surprise no one that populist measures are going to be well received by his political base.

Economically, A Loss

While the optics on the EOs are undeniably favorable to the President, their economic consequences to the country are unlikely to be entirely benign, and arguably they are counter-productive.

The eviction moratorium, while undoubtedly popular, particularly with lower-income voters, does nothing to address the costs and financial obligations landlords incur even as it shields renters from the consequences of non-payment of rent. In very practical terms, the moratorium is an additional (and significant) regulatory burden on landlords, greatly increasing their costs and turning rental properties into a money-losing proposition:

Trump emphasized that halting evictions and keeping people in their homes has become a priority. A big part of the problem is that letting people remain in the property without paying rent does not stop the bills a landlord must pay from coming due. This rapidly makes being a landlord a money-losing proposition.

The FPUC stipend, on the other hand, is extremely problematic for one simple reason: It is not much of an economic stimulus.

A big part of the problem with the stipend is that, for many Americans, it amounts to an increase in income over their previous wages, and thus for them is a significant disincentive to look for a job.

Under the Pelosi policy, 5 out of 6 unemployed workers are getting paid more NOT to work than to return to the job, according to the Congressional Budget Office. We estimate that most workers who earn $30 or less are financially better off staying off the job -- even as the economy improves. Many workers can get twice as much for staying unemployed. Workers are supposed to lose unemployment benefits if they are offered a job and don't take it. But workers know how to game the system. They can pretend to be sick, and employers are loath to bring a contagious worker back in the office or factory.

Conservative thinkers blame the stipend on the odd economic phenomenon of America having some 5 million unfilled jobs, some 25 million unemployed, and no one is rushing to take one of those 5 million jobs. 

Nor is this a criticism per se of workers. Those that are acting in the way described above are merely rationally attempting to maximize their income. While some might accuse them of gaming the system, the sober reality is they are playing the game by the rules laid out by Congress. That the rules arguably act as a disincentive to employment is a sin of Congress, not of workers.

More crucially, however, is the glaring hole in the entire political strategy of providing "relief": a complete lack of serious efforts to encourage job creation and new business formation. With 71,500 businesses advertising on Yelp! have closed their doors permanently, when 80% of restaurants in San Francisco and 50% of mall businesses are closing or are about to close permanently, there is a clear need for encouragements to start up new businesses to replace the closed ones.

Nor does the stipend confront the reality of current increasing joblessness. During the first week of August continuing jobless claims rose by 1.3 million--almost the same amount as the number of jobs created in all of July (1.8 million or 1.4 million, depending on whose numbers you are prepared to believe). That rise in continuing claims comes on the heels of the previous two weeks' increases in initial jobless claims--indicating that joblessness began rising before the FPUC stipend expired.

Nor has President Trump been able to extend or renew the Payroll Protection Program, a forgivable loan program intended to keep people on a payroll in some form or fashion that expired on August 8.

As was shown after the 2008-2009 recession, extending and increasing government benefits does not stimulate the economy over the long term, and there is considerable evidence that the American economy resumed economic contraction during July:

• Wholesale inventories expanded at the end of June.
• Worldwide trade volumes and shipping rates have all but collapsed.
• Spending declined even before the FPUC stipend expired.
• Depletion of PPP funds meant that businesses began laying people off in July.
• Traffic patterns in New York City are a fraction of pre-pandemic levels.
• 60% of businesses are reporting revenues less than 75% of pre-pandemic levels.

Just as the FPUC stipend initially failed to mitigate these issues, Donald Trump's executive orders also fail to address these issues.

Kick The Can

Ultimately, Donald Trump's Executive Orders do little more than kick the economic can down the road. The renewal of the stipend forestalls the demand shock that would have attended upon an abrupt withdrawal of some $18 Billion in spending per week from the economy. The eviction moratorium staves off a potential crisis in homelessness. Congress, for its part, is able to negotiate without pending economic crisis hanging over it like the mythical Sword of Damocles.

Yet kicking the can down the road is all these EOs provide. It is all these EOs can provide. The real issues remain unresolved (and even unaddressed). Lunatic lockdown orders persist in many parts of the country, and are dragging the economy down even as they fail to reduce the spread of CCPVirus.

The EOs quite possibly will fail to even sustain the economy, and do little to prevent further economic collapse.

Aside from President Trump, the only group that clearly benefits overall from these EOs is Congress itself. With a stroke of a pen Donald Trump has removed a major Congressional logjam and spared them the growing humiliation of seeing their supine legacy media outlets grill them persistently about the relief bill and what Congress has to say to those people who's benefits were all but obliterated at the end of July.

For the rest of America, the need is still crystal clear. The country needs jobs--lots of jobs. Until such time as there is a mammoth effort to replace the tens of millions of jobs lost, measures such as these EOs will remain but half-measures of little to no positive economic impact.

Is Adam Schiff Guilty Of Perjury?

As the Impeachment Trial of President Trump gets underway, Congressman Adam Schiff, the leader of the House Managers arguing the case for impeachment on behalf of the House Democrats, submitted to the Senate his "Trial Memorandum" laying out his theory of impeachment and the case he will be arguing on its behalf.

The memorandum has just one problem: It's a lie. Many of of Congressman Shiff's allegations are simply and demonstrably not true.

It is to Schiff's benefit that the memorandum appears to not have been filed under penalty of felony, for if it were Schiff would be guilty of perjury, instead of merely lying to the Senate. Yet let there be no misapprehension here: Congressman Adam Schiff has without a doubt lied to the Senate as he has lied to the American people throughout this impeachment inquiry. The only thing standing between Schiff and a perjury charge is the status of the Trial Memorandum as not being sworn and subscribed to.

The Purpose Of Impeaching Donald Trump: Breaking Presidential Power

Nancy Pelosi finally completed the impeachment of the President, signing the articles of impeachment and transmitting them to the Senate. With articles in hand, the Senate officially swore in Chief Justice John Roberts to preside over the impeachment trial, and the senators themselves were sworn in as the impeachment jury--the Senate has now been converted into the Court of Impeachments described by Alexander Hamilton in Federalist 65.

After months of partisan wrangling over hyperpartisan inquiry and investigation by the House, the Senate finally will have its say on the merits and demerits of the case the Democrats have assembled, even as the true purpose of impeachment has already been revealed and acknowledge by those same Democrats: removing a President they do not like, or at least subordinating him to the whimsy of Congress.

Profiles In Courage

It is rare for a single vote by a single Congressman to be noteworthy, or even remarkable. Recently we have seen several remarkable votes by individual Congressmen--those willing to buck demands for party loyalty and unity in defense of larger principles. With so many politicians of all stripes pandering to their particular political base, we should take a moment to consider those who decided to take step back from the partisan divide.

Persuading The People On Impeachment

The great impeachment story of the past week, after the House voted Articles of Impeachment against President Trump, was Speaker Nancy Pelosi's sudden decision not to transmit the articles to the Senate for the impeachment trial that is the second phase of the impeachment process. According to statements she made to the press immediately after the impeachment vote, she has a concern the impeachment trial procedures would be unduly biased towards the President.

“So far we haven’t seen anything that looks fair to us,” Pelosi told reporters at a news conference just moments after the House charged Trump with abuse of power and obstructing congressional investigations. “That would’ve been our intention, but we’ll see what happens over there.”

Trump Is Still ALMOST Impeached

Even the sobriquet "Clown World" fails to do the absurdity of the Democratic caucus in the House of Representatives justice. Having engaged in an unprecedented act of political self-immolation in voting ludicrous Articles Of Impeachment against President Donald Trump, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi now seeks to nullify her party's effort at nullifying the 2016 electoral outcome by refusing to send those Articles on to the Senate for an impeachment trial.

Her reason? A concern that the Senate trial will not be "fair" to the Democrats.

“So far we haven’t seen anything that looks fair to us,” Pelosi told reporters at a news conference just moments after the House charged Trump with abuse of power and obstructing congressional investigations. “That would’ve been our intention, but we’ll see what happens over there.”

The answer to Casey Stengel's immortal question "Can't anybody here play this game?" for the House Democrats is a resounding "No".

Trump Is (Almost) Impeached

It comes down to this. All of the Democrats bluster, and posturing, and pontificating, all of the hearings, secret and public, all of the testimony, all of the direct and cross examination of witnesses, are now reduced to a single House Resolution--number 755--containing two Articles of Impeachment against President Donald Trump, alleging high crimes and misdemeanors.

As of this writing, this resolution was voted out of the House Judiciary Committee on a strict party-line vote, 23-17. Not one Republican voted for the resolution. Not one Democrat voted against. Over the next several days, the resolution will be voted on by the full House of Representatives. 

Impeachment: The Case For, The Case Against

After weeks of closed-door depositions and two weeks of public hearings, both the Democrats and the Republicans on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence have released their reports on Adam Schiff's impeachment inquiry into President Trump. 

We now have Adam Schiff's case for impeachment, and we have the Republican rebuttal.

The Tangled Mangled Web Of Clown World

Oh! What a tangled web we weave,

When first we practice to deceive

Sir Walter Scott, Marmion 

There is a certain irony in a blogger beginning his blog by saying "I have no words."

Yet truly there are no words for what we are witnessing unfold in the legacy media. The hypocrisy and the absurdity reaches such a level that even the derisive "Clown World" no longer seems adequate. "Orwellian", "Kafkaesque"...all have been surpassed in the legacy media's quest for ever more drama and controversy.

While the legacy media engages in its dutiful pearl clutching over Donald Trump, Jr., and his seeming "outing" of Eric Ciamarella--the "Humpty Dumpty Whistleblower," who qualifies as as a whistleblower only if you use never-before imagined meanings of the term--it almost casually retaliated against a real whistleblower, the former ABC employee who obtained the hot mic video of ABC News Anchor Amy Rorbach venting frustrations over ABC's decision to squelch an investigative story about Jeffrey Epstein. Literally almost at the same time, the legacy media on the one hand extended the courtesy of pretend anonymity to Eric Ciaramella while denying that same protection to the Epstein whistleblower.

Hypocrisy...absurdity..."Clown World ethics"...all these words apply, and yet somehow none of them do the present reality any semblance of justice.

How is it that ABC News willingly chose to forego a major news scoop three years ago, sitting on the Jeffrey Epstein story for reasons unknown? 

How is it that the legacy media can pretend to be "protecting" Eric Ciamarella's identity when it has echoed across the Twitterverse and even some portions of the legacy media--when even Congressman Adam Schiff failed to fully redact his name from some of the transcripts recently released by his committee (as was discovered by several Alt-Media sources, most notably "71 Republic")?

Twitter wants to punish you for merely uttering the whistleblower’s name, which most media organizations have been too scared to publish.

We are not most media organizations.

Eric Ciaramella. William Taylor’s testimony. Page 236 pic.twitter.com/GxY9tEEJjM

— 71 Republic (@71RepublicMedia) November 7, 2019

How is it that neither the Democrats nor the legacy media can be bothered to take note of what the Constitution or federal statutes say regarding the impeachment of the President, or acknowledge that even in Clown World, the rule of law must prevail?

If the legacy media were merely trying to deceive the public, pushing their usual "bread and circuses" pabulum, that would be one thing. If the legacy media and the Democrat majority in the House of Representatives were conspiring to deceive the public to give the Democrats a shot at grabbing political power, that would be another. Yet the legacy media and the Democrats have been so abysmally inept in their deception, it boggles the mind. Even Casey Stengel, sardonic manager of the 1962 Mets--still baseball's gold standard for a truly inept team--and his immortal question "Can't anyone here play this game?" seems pitifully inadequate to the occasion.

Clown World is the land of the insane, apparently.

Clown World is the land of the vengeful, as Facebook and Twitter have engaged in random punitive bans and deletions for accounts daring to publish Eric Ciamarella's name  (including the facebook page for yours truly--in Facebook "jail" for seven days), despite it having been in open discussion online, having been outed  by Paul Sperry of RealClearInvestigations, and having been the most open secret of all in Washington, the city built on open secrets.

Clown World is the land of the unironic triggered virtue signaling, as that gaggle of leftist ladies known as "The View" displayed when Donald Trump Jr., out to promote his book "Triggered", left them in apoplectic high dudgeon by merely pointing out a few (gasp!) empirical facts.

These events would make for a relatively full news week, but all of this has transpired just today (7 November 2019). In just a few short hours, the lunatic left in the US put renewed emphasis on the "lunatic" part.

In one regard, much of this madness seems inevitable. With regards to the current impeachment hysteria, so many demonstrably false assertions have been made that to defend them all invariably leads one into a maze of contradictions. The brazen hypocrisy of the legacy media suppressing vital stories about Jeffrey Epstein was an immediate takeaway from Project Veritas' video drop, which made their punitive retaliation against the whistleblower who provided the video almost a foregone conclusion--it was mere happenstance that it was set against the backdrop of media meanderings about the importance of protecting whistleblowers.

It may also be that the contradictions serve a larger purpose for the legacy media--to sow confusion and chaos in the minds of the public. If people are unsure what to think, they are less likely to question what is reported.

Yet we should question, now most of all, for the contradictions, the chaos, the confusion point to another important truth: the narratives of the legacy media are nothing but lies built upon lies. Adam Schiff's Clown World impeachment inquiry is slowly drowning under a sea of deceptions and contrived leaks from his "secret" hearings, with each leak quickly being discredited as the full transcript of a deposition is made known. ABC News' lawyerly statements on why they suppressed the Jeffrey Epstein story are too clever by half, and leave unanswered the question of why they do not release the story now. Time and again, the legacy media is being caught in yet another bald-faced lie.

While the narratives may be confusing, the facts are not. The facts are still available, the facts are still discernible even within the legacy media's own propagandistic reporting. We know what Amy Rorbach said on the "hot mic" tape, because we can watch the video for ourselves and assess her words for ourselves. We can read the Schiff transcripts from his hearings for ourselves, and most of all we can read the transcript of Donald Trump's phone call to Ukrainian President Zelensky for ourselves, if not to determine his true intent at least to ascertain if there are any grounds for imputing corrupt motive (there are none). We can read the Constitution, and we can look up federal statutes on bribery, corruption, and conflict of interest.

At the core of the tangled mangled web of Clown World lies a simple world of skepticism, of doubt, of critical thinking and of a pursuit of the facts. For many, the pursuit of the facts has been the role of the legacy media, and for many there is hope pursuit of the facts will become the role of the alternative media. Perhaps the alternative media will rise to the moment and become useful distributors of fact and figure. Whether it does or not, every man and every woman should remember that we all have the capacity to pursue the facts. We should all remember we have the power to demand the facts, and to not be turned away until we have the facts.

I have commented too many times to recount how wholly undeserving of trust the legacy media is. The latent left-leaning bias that has always been understood to be the habit of the legacy media has devolved into pure propaganda and clickbait. Presenting information, facts, and figures fails to generate any meaningful media buzz. The media would prefer there also to be high drama, with or without a grounding in the relevant facts. Today, the legacy media proved that once more.

For the sake of drama, the legacy media will lie to you, and do so casually, even contemptuously. The legacy media will lie and prevaricate to defend its chosen narratives at all costs, facts be damned. The legacy media will hide the truth, bury it as deep as it can, to protect the powerful and the elites among us. The past 24 hours have proven all of this in spades.

Such is the tangled mangled web of Clown World.

The Humpty Dumpty Whistleblower

`And only one for birthday presents, you know. There’s glory for you!’ 

`I don’t know what you mean by “glory,”‘ Alice said. 

Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. `Of course you don’t — till I tell you. I meant “there’s a nice knock-down argument for you!”‘ 

`But “glory” doesn’t mean “a nice knock-down argument,”‘ Alice objected. 

`When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, `it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’ 

`The question is,’ said Alice, `whether you can make words mean so many different things.’ 

`The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, `which is to be master – – that’s all.’

Lewis Carroll, Through The Looking Glass

When Lewis Carroll becomes an apt description of present reality, Clown World has gone too far. 

As evidence that we are in exactly that predicament, I submit the constant media hyperventilation over the (in)famous "whistleblower" who set the Democrats' impeachment of President Trump in motion.

Clear The Air

First, a few declarations are in order, for clarity and completeness:

1. Without addressing the merits and demerits of the whistleblower, my position in all my commentary on this subject to date is that the Democrats have failed to define any actual offense, much less an impeachable one. My derision of their efforts as a "Clown World Impeachment" follows from this lack of substance.
2. Process is not substance. Criticisms of the Democrats' impeachment process do not entail an intrinsic belief in the President's ultimate guilt or innocence. Rather, they emphasize that only through an open and deliberate process with scrupulous attention to the rights of the accused can we make a fair and reasoned assessment based on the substance.
3. As regards substance, my opinion, based on the facts publicly presented thus far, is that the Democrats have none.

With these declarations in hand, it comes as no surprise that I take a dim view of the Democrats' impeachment proceedings. However, that view does not preclude a reasoned evaluation of the treatment accorded by Congress and by the legacy media to the person claiming whistleblower protection for having reported a presumed malfeasance by President Trump.

At the present time, the legacy media is steadfast in its refusal to "out" the whistleblower and share his name with the public. As Howard Kurtz of Fox News reports, the media does not consider it to be their role to provide this information, and that failure to protect his identity would discourage future whistleblowers.

For the record, I do not share Howard Kurtz' conclusion, for the reasons I shall illuminate here, and have zero qualms in mentioning the name that has been associated with the presumed whistleblower, a name which has not been refuted by the whisleblower's own attorneys. Also for the record, let us be clear about who the individual is: Eric Ciaramella, so identified by investigative journalist Paul Sperry for RealClearInvestigations just prior to Halloween.

For the rest of this article, I shall consider Eric Ciaramella to be definitively the "whistleblower".

Is He A Whistleblower?

To appraise Eric Ciaramella as a whistleblower, we just first turn to the relevant law--the Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act--found at 50 USC 3033(k)(5) et seq. The key provision is the first paragraph of the section:

An employee of an element of the intelligence community, an employee assigned or detailed to an element of the intelligence community, or an employee of a contractor to the intelligence community who intends to report to Congress a complaint or information with respect to an urgent concern may report such complaint or information to the Inspector General.

The thrust of this is simple: people with concerns about how the US government is handling intelligence matters may take those concerns up with the Inspector General (ICIG).  We should also make note of what matters individuals within the Intelligence Community are empowered to report (emphasis added):

In this paragraph, the term “urgent concern” means any of the following:

(i) A serious or flagrant problem, abuse, violation of law or Executive order, or deficiency relating to the funding, administration, or operation of an intelligence activity within the responsibility and authority of the Director of National Intelligence involving classified information, but does not include differences of opinions concerning public policy matters.

(ii) A false statement to Congress, or a willful withholding from Congress, on an issue of material fact relating to the funding, administration, or operation of an intelligence activity.

(iii) An action, including a personnel action described in section 2302(a)(2)(A) of title 5, constituting reprisal or threat of reprisal prohibited under subsection (g)(3)(B) of this section in response to an employee’s reporting an urgent concern in accordance with this paragraph.

This is where we encounter a problem. If Eric Ciaramella is an Intelligence Community Whistleblower--as the legacy media asserts that he is--then his complaint must involve classified information and must pertain to an intelligence activity, but must not involve an opinion on public policy. Unfortunately for Mr. Ciaramella, President Trump's July 25 telephone call to President Zelensky of the Ukraine does not involve any intelligence activity. The thrust of the call was government corruption and Ukraine's efforts to stamp it out.

Within the context of that July 25 telephone call, there is no "urgent concern" the reporting of which Eric Ciaramella may perform under the aegis of whistleblower protections.

Whatever else he may be, Eric Ciaramella is not a whistleblower, by definition. The law as it is written does not extend that status to him in any capacity.

Who Is Eric Ciaramella?

Even Presidents enjoy a Sixth Amendment right to face their accuser. Thus, it is not only appropriate but imperative that the persona of Eric Ciaramella be fleshed out. As it happens, that persona already has a certain color and  involvement with the efforts to "get" President Trump via the Russian Collusion Hoax. As has been documented by Gateway Pundit and other sources:

• Eric Ciaramella worked with Joe Biden previously.
• Was fired from a White House job for leaking to the media.
• May figure in the DOJ Inspector General's report on the abuse and misuse of the FISA system.

At a minimum, Eric Ciaramella comes to this controversy with a bit of personal baggage.

Yet even if that were not true, there are still other aspects of Ciaramella's backstory that are troubling, not the least of which is his interaction with Congressman Adam Schiff and the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence before he communicated his concerns regarding the July 25 telephone call to the ICIG.

The impact of any of this information on the substance of what he reported is a matter to be adjudicated openly, either by the House of Representatives, the Senate, or the public at large. For this reason alone, not only does Ciaramella not enjoy any expectation of anonymity, but it is imperative that he not remain anonymous. His identity, and his backstory, as relevant facts to the impeachment inquiry, and cannot be considered so long as he hides behind anonymity (brief pause to note the irony of a person named repeatedly on the Internet enjoying "anonymity" in the legacy media).

Why Call Him A Whistleblower?

All of the foregoing begs the question of why the legacy media persists in referring to Eric Ciaramella as "the whistleblower." He is no such creature, and provably so. 

We should note here that the term "whistleblower" carries a connotation of one who reports wrongdoing at great personal risk and expense to himself:

an employee who brings wrongdoing by an employer or other employees to the attention of a government or law enforcement agency and who is commonly vested by statute with rights and remedies for retaliation

While Eric Ciaramella may be placing his employment in jeopardy by his current course of action, it should be noted that there is no plausible basis for any notion that his personal safety is at issue. If anything, it is the defenders of President Trump and not his detractors who have had to look to their personal safety. As for "retaliation", even within government circles the mere continuation of the impeachment imbroglio attests to the probability that Ciaramella would not lack for employment opportunities in the future. Beyond the obvious concerns of a job, "retaliation" is not a plausible concern for Eric Ciaramella.

Yet the legacy media persists in labeling him as "the whistleblower", not because he is, but because the legacy media wants him to be. In true Humpty Dumpty fashion, the legacy media has decided the term "whistleblower" will mean whatever they wish it to mean. For them, "whistleblower" is "a government worker who makes salacious and inflammatory accusations against the President."

Nor is it difficult to surmise why the legacy media would do this. For both Democrats and the legacy media, the implication that there is wrongdoing at issue greatly strengthens their public presentation of their case, and gives all the impeachment hysteria justification. The tactic seeks to put Trump's defenders on the back foot by narrowing the debate to the scope and magnitude of the wrong done, not debating whether in fact any wrong was done at all.

Unfortunately for them, the question of whether there is any impeachable offense involved in the July 25 call is very much the essential question of the moment. It is the essential question because the letter of the law, both within the Constitution and within federal statute, argues mightily against there being any corrupt act by President Trump with regards to that call. Far from being a debate over whether there was an impeachable offense, the real debate is whether there was an offense at all--and the evidences thus far strongly suggest there is no offense, impeachable or otherwise. Even the closed-door depositions of various witnesses such as the former US Ambassador to the Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch do not establish any form of "quid pro quo", corrupt, or otherwise.

These inconvenient realities are all swept aside and ignored by granting Eric Ciaramella the inappropriate appellation of "the whistleblower." In this latest "Orange Man Bad" narrative, sarcastically named "Russian Collusion 2: Ukrainian Boogaloo" by the Twitterverse, facts which undermine the claims are studiously suppressed, most particularly by the legacy media (which seems to not have learned from the Russian Collusion Hoax the lunacy of putting their collective thumb on the scale of a story).

Words Matter

Whether Donald Trump's policies or attitudes towards Ukraine are appropriate or inappropriate is a policy matter that, for this discussion, I will not address. People of good conscience can disagree in good conscience over such matters. Yet, in good conscience, we must address the facts as they are, not as we wish them to be. We must use the words which convey our most accurate understanding of the facts, and we must alter our words as our understandings evolve with the addition of new facts and a more nuanced context. Regardless of the position we take on any topic, the words we use do matter.

It matters that Eric Ciaramella is wrongly termed a "whistleblower". It matters that his allegations, regardless of whatever factual predicates he might have, are incorrectly granted the moral heft inherent in someone reporting "wrongdoing". It matters that the legacy media cynically distorts the facts of his allegation by automatically imputing a sense of malfeasance to President Trump's actions--that imputation is a pre-judging of guilt that is logically unsound, morally indefensible, and absolutely at odds with all established notions of due process and the rule of law.

The legacy media is not Humpty Dumpty, and even if this is Clown World we have not gone through the looking glass. This is the real world. In every Clown World narrative, the consequences are felt in this real world. Though the legacy media may wish to assign whatever meanings it finds convenient to words, no honest discussion, no meaningful debate, can long abide such intellectual insanity. For us to grasp the nettle of President Trump's actions, both good and bad, we must use language honestly, and we must ground our words in the empirical reality that surrounds us.

We must stop calling Eric Ciaramella "the Whistleblower". The Humpty Dumpty Whistleblower is no Whistleblower at all, merely a fictionalized media creation intended to further an already decrepit and largely debunked narrative.

The Humpty Dumpty Whistleblower is a media fiction, but Eric Ciaramella is a real person. He has made real allegations about a real event against a very real President Trump. We should give full weight to all that Eric Ciaramella has to say, but we should do so here in the real world, and not venture once more through the looking glass into Clown World.

America Voted, And The Winner Was...."None Of The Above"

The results are in, and once again the American electorate has voted for gridlock.

With a number of races still to be called in the House, the Democrats thus far have an absolute minimum of seats needed to control that chamber.  The Republicans, meanwhile have added at least 3 seats to their majority in the Senate.

The legacy media is already giving their typical partisan spin on the results: Dana Milbank at the highly left-leaning Washington Post titled his assessment "America Steps Back From The Abyss". Fox News, ever the reliable establishmentarian conservative outlet, reaches the opposite conclusion with "Thanks to Trump, the Blue Wave Becomes a Ripple.".

Ultimately, both are wrong.

One of the enduring myths of government in the modern era is the notion that Americans want government to do much. Historically, Americans take a dim view of activist government. Since World War II, there have been only 14 out of 37 sessions of Congress (including the upcoming session) where the same party controlled the Senate, the House, and the Presidency:

During that same period, America has had 20 sessions of Congress with a Republican President and only 17 sessions with a Democrat President. Republicans have controlled the Senate for 13 sessions and the House for 11 Sessions. Only once has America voted to give a President a unified Congress, and that was in 2002, when President George W. Bush was handed a Republican Senate to go with a Republican House. In 2010 and now again in 2018 the voters have responded to unified government by giving control of the House to the opposition party.

What America rejects is not so much Democrat and Republican politicians, but rather unified and effective government under either.  If there is any historical consensus among the electorate, it is for a Republican President with at least one chamber of Congress in Democratic hands. Partisanship is not the expressed will of We The People, not over the long term.

America's notion of good government, then, is not government that is either Democrat Blue or Republican Red. Good government in this Republic is Democrats and Republicans together addressing the nation's issues and attending to the nation's business.  Divided government produced the 1986 tax reforms under Ronald Reagan, and the 1996 welfare reforms under Bill Clinton.

In contrast, the unified Democratic administration of Lyndon Johnson ended in the social upheaval and chaos of 1968. The unified Democratic administration of Jimmy Carter resulted in "stagflation" which ushered in the Reagan era. The unified Republican administration of George W. Bush authorized Operation Iraqi Freedom. The unified Democratic administration of  Barack Obama resulted in Obamacare.

America's experience of unified government does not encourage us to indulge in it often.

If there is an election mandate arising from the 2018 midterm election results it is this: Democrats and Republicans must work together, and the Congress must work with the President to conduct this nation's business. If there is an electoral rebuke to be derived from these results it is to the notion that either party is much trusted by the American electorate with untrammeled power.  America prefers government that does what is necessary but no more than that--Americans prefer government to do too little than too much.

When given the choice between Democrats in power and Republicans in power, the choice of We The People has been once again "none of the above."

Hopefully, our elected officials in Washington will understand this and will behave accordingly.