Rumors Of Civil War: Democrats Say This Must Happen

You will hear of wars and rumors of wars, but see to it that you are not alarmed. Such things must happen, but the end is still to come. 

-- Matthew 24:6

The Gospels teach us there is a certain inevitability to conflict. Good will always be matched against Evil, and men will always be called to choose the side on which they stand.

Viewed against that backdrop, the civic strife that has dominated the legacy media in 2020 was always fated to happen. The accumulated disputes and disagreements of decades have, in such an hypothesis, coalesced into existential crisis of putative Good against seeming Evil.

That is one interpretation.

Another interpretation is that the orgy of violence that has racked cities from Portland to Kenosha to Minneapolis to Atlanta is not merely the boiling over of long-simmering disputes, but is rather the calculated design of malign actors as a pathway to political power. Disturbingly, this view of things is substantiated not by sacred text but by the headlines and reporting of the legacy media. When viewed as a whole and not piecemeal, the media coverage of the various riots and protests in this country presents a clear and deliberate moving of this country towards civil war.

Farther Down The Rabbit Hole: The Long Dark Twilight Of America's Banking Collapse

In his August 15, 2020, press conference, President Trump delivered a glowing assessment of the current state of the United States economy,  spending considerable time crowing about the speed of the current economic "recovery". 

There is just one problem with his economic analysis: it is completely wrong.

In his zeal to both defend his policies and maintain a spirit of optimism for the future, President Trump is relying on certain top-level benchmark indicators while ignoring the far less favorable dynamics taking place underneath. The top level numbers do suggest expansion is occurring, but they overlook the distorting impact of the massive government injections of money into household incomes as well as the ongoing injections of liquidity by the Federal Reserve into financial markets. 

To accurately assess the true state of the economy, we must first unwind these distortions.

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.

Getting The Trump Presidency All Wrong

Within the span of two days, President Donald Trump reminded the world yet again the extent to which the legacy media has completely failed to grasp the essence of the Trump Administration. We are barely into 2020, and already the prevailing narratives surrounding Donald Trump have been completely shredded. Trump accomplished with just two highly surgical air strikes against pro-Iranian Iraqi militias and their Iranian sponsors, the first one resulting in the death of Qassim Suleimani, leader of Iran's Quds Force, and the second targeting part of the leadership of the pro-Iranian Popular Mobilization Forces militia.

(Note: Subsequent reporting suggests the PMF leadership was not killed in this second strike, with the PMF disputing Pentagon claims in this regard. As of this writing much of the reporting is unconfirmed with many details subject to change)

Clown World Without End

To call today's seminal news event "significant" would be a study in ironic understatement. The death of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in an attack by US Special Forces is a major blow to the ISIS terrorist organization, and quite possibly the death knell for any thought of the ISIS caliphate reconstituting itself within the territories of Iraq and Syria.

For any advocate of Western culture and Western civilization, the death of al-Baghdadi is a sobering moment, but a positive one. al-Baghdadi was a terrorist, and a particularly vile and violent terrorist, responsible for the deaths of thousands in cruel and barbaric fashion. It is no exaggeration to say that Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was an evil human being, and an enemy of all mankind. While I generally refrain from celebrating the demise of another human being, it would be difficult not to acknowledge the good his death will do in the Middle East.

My own sentiments are summarized in my post on Gab:

Washington, DC, for its part, alternated between congratulatory praise (mostly from Republicans), to somewhat predictable pouting from Democrats at having been kept out of the loop until after the attack was concluded.

Yet while we congratulate the US Military and President Trump for this undeniable victory, we must ask a troublesome and troubling question:

What on Earth is wrong with the legacy media?

As my Gab posting shows, Bloomberg had a rather anodyne obituary of al-Baghdadi. Not to be outdone, the Washington Post went even farther in sanitizing the bloody legacy of the ISIS leader, rewriting their initial obituary headline, removing "terrorist-in-chief" in favor of "extremist leader of Islamic State".

The original headline as of this morning

The headline as of this writing

Congressman Steve Scalise captured the repugnant irony of the Washington Post headline revision perfectly on Twitter:

Every day The Washington Post uses harsher words against @realDonaldTrump than they do in writing about one of the world’s most evil terrorists. Yet we’re supposed to take them at face value. Let that sink in. pic.twitter.com/iIWVqI4N8B

— Steve Scalise (@SteveScalise) October 27, 2019

The cynical view of this is that the legacy media, and in particular the Washington Post, is engaging in clickbait journalism. Their headline revisions have the absolutely foreseeable effect of making the paper's coverage of the story part of the story. The Twitterverse is replete with many online commentators, including several political figures, weighing in, not on the killing of al-Baghdadi, which is a legitimate news event, but on the Washington Post's headline, which is anything but legitimate news--and I will acknowledge the irony in decrying the headline as illegitimate "Fake" news even as I comment at length on it here.

It takes no great stretch of imagination to envision the Washington Post driving a few more mouse clicks, and a few more bits of ad revenue, by creating this controversy. It is speculation, of course, and I do not claim any inside information about this, but it is a speculation that fits the available facts, and the known tendencies of the legacy media to pursue clickbait narratives at the expense of the facts and contexts of a particular story. It is a perfectly proper logical conclusion to impute the outcomes of an action as the intended outcome, and so it is fair to presume, with the evidence of controversy surrounding the Post, that this was the intended outcome.

Clown World, it seems, is to be eternal. Narratives for the sake of revenue truly are the business model of the legacy media, and not even a major news event will motivate them to break away from that profit-driven strategy to treat serious news seriously, with at least some objectivity and some effort to contain biases.

That may be their choice. It is a bad choice. Worse, it is an unnecessary choice.

ISIS has been sufficiently in the minds of Americans--and indeed people around the world--that this event would grab everyone's attention even without clickbait. al-Baghdadi's demise is, ultimately, a positive event for the Western world, but also for the moderate portions of the Islamic world. al-Baghdadi had a bloody hand in bringing about the bloody civil war that has afflicted Syria for years, and on that basis alone a great many Muslim people arguably have cause to breathe a sigh of relief at his passing.

Surely this is interest enough to drive enough mouse clicks, and generate enough ad revenue, to satisfy the heads of the legacy media companies?

For everyone else, the Washington Post headline, and Bloomberg's sanitizing of al-Baghdadi's past, are yet another reminder of how untrustworthy the legacy media truly is, and how skeptical we should be of everything they report. It is no longer an exaggeration to say that if the Washington Post reports the sun rising in the east tomorrow, the smart reader will be up at the crack of dawn to visually confirm the statement.

With many more important news stories out there than the death of the ISIS leader, this disregard for credibility by the legacy media will only serve to drive the readership of alternative media and alternative publications. Organizations such as Breitbart, One America News Network, and The Epoch Times all rightly deserve modest praise for at least acknowledging the reality of ISIS and of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. In the wake of the Russian Collusion Hoax, and in the growing mudfest its sequel, "Russian Collusion 2: Ukrainian Boogaloo", this failure by the legacy media to capture a moment by reporting the facts and not their hyperpartisan anti-Trump narratives only serves to underscore how lacking in legitimacy and credibility the legacy media is. 

Truly, the case is being made by the legacy media that to read the legacy media is to be misinformed. With or without clickbait journalism, that is not an image that will sustain the legacy media very far into the future.

All The World's A Stage

All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players

As You Like It, Act 2, Scene 7

In order to understand the serial hysterias of the past few years, one must dispense with the notion that the news is actually the news. As I opined in my last posting, what we get from the legacy media is not "news", but merely "infotainment", scripted dramatics calibrated to titillate, enrage, possibly entertain, definitely distract, but never ever inform the public.

Armed with this understanding, the seemingly insane actions of government officials and politicians becomes immediately sane and rational.  Since the media is only interested in providing entertainment, everyone is merely playing out their assigned role. Much like the manufactured dramatics that are the stock in trade of "reality" television, the poses and phony outrage of Democrat and Republican alike are merely the latest scripted pseudo-controversy. 

The proof? Consider this latest breathless reveal, courtesy of Breitbart, that the so-called "whistleblower" within the US Intelligence Community amazingly failed to disclose to the Intelligence Community Inspector General Michael Atkinson his interactions with Adam Schiff's staffers on the House Intelligence Committee. Not only is this a rather amazing failure to follow the established process, it is also either an amazing lack of due diligence by the ICIG in failing to ask the rather obvious question "To whom have you spoken about this matter?", or an amazing bit of deceit by the whistleblower, who would have had to have lied in response to that question. In order to accept either of these narrative arcs one must have a willing (and even naive) suspension of disbelief.

For the record, I am not willing to suspend disbelief and I do not consider myself naive.

Further, we have The Washington Post somewhat sanctimoniously assigning Adam Schiff "four Pinocchios" for his proven lies regarding said whistleblower. Schiff even went so far as to read into the Congressional Record a "parody" of Donald Trump's telephone call with Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelensky--perhaps instead of four Pinocchios Schiff should be nominated for an Emmy Award for Outstanding Performance in a Phony Political Drama.

Yet not all the theatrics come from Democrats. In his never-ending quest for headlines and presumably some relevance, alleged Republican Mitt Romney lashed out against Donald Trump for suggesting China investigate Joe Biden and his son, Hunter, calling it "wrong and appalling", suggesting the push for investigations were motivated solely by politics. Romney's theatrical chops were on full display, as he managed to gloss over the very obvious and very real potentials for significant conflicts of interest that exist in Hunter Biden's foreign business dealings. Are we seriously supposed to believe that a former venture capital financier such as Mitt Romney has never dealt with the legal realities of conflict of interest, or the standard that even the appearance of a conflict of interest is to be avoided?

Again, I am not naive and I am not willing to suspend my disbelief.

However, if this is all a charade, a media drama concocted to entertain the mass audience, and Messrs Atkinson, Schiff, and Romney are merely furthering the narrative arc along, then these poses, these postures, these outrageous and scarcely credible lies, all start to make sense. If, instead of being serious participants in serious political and legal process, they are merely bad actors reading from a worse script, we can see that they are merely poor players gamely attempting to hold the audience' attention. 

Impeachment? Just another story hook.

Collusion and conspiracy with the Ukraine? Also just another story hook.

Scandal erupting over House Biden's nepotism and insider trading? Still just another story hook.

Investigations? Farces all, with each and every committee hearing just another spontaneous example of theater of the absurd.

As veteran newsman Ted Koppel pointed out in a media symposium this time last year, "CNN’s ratings would be in the toilet without Donald Trump". Ultimately, the legacy media has adopted a clickbait strategy to eke out a few more years before their business model collapses completely. When the Mueller Report failed to produce the hoped-for incriminations and indictments leading to President Trump's impeachment, CNN and MSNBC experienced precipitous ratings drops--once the show ended, the audience left and went in search of new diversions and amusements. 

Is it any wonder that we are now being presented with a fresh "scandal" modeled on the same narrative premise, that of Donald Trump seeking and perhaps receiving undue foreign influences on America's electoral politics? Is it any wonder that we are being treated to "Russia 2.0"?

Give credit where credit is due. The clickbait business strategy appears to be working. Donald Trump is the single most popular political figure in the news media, and has been since he announced his candidacy for President. Pick any time period, and Donald Trump dwarfs the entirety of the Democratic field in search interest, as this sample of Google Trends for 4 September through 11 September shows. Donald Trump is not merely "very, very good for baseball," as Ted Koppel put it; Donald Trump is the entire game.

Give Donald Trump credit as well. His one definitive insight into American politics has been to realize that the legacy media has reduced political news coverage to an ongoing reality television show that bears more than a passing similarity to Donald Trump's own TV show "The Apprentice." His great tactical masterstroke has been to embrace this, to be a true "reality television" President, and to make that work as a means for advancing his policy agenda. 

But give criticism where criticism is due. The clickbait strategy ignores news items that are less dramatic, less emotionally charged, but arguably even more relevant than whether Donald Trump did or did not misbehave on a phone call with the Ukrainian President.

While the legacy media drives attention to the tweets and antics of Donald Trump, the Federal Reserve is quietly restarting quantitative easing, even as Jay Powell proclaims the economy to be "in a good place." One would think that the possibility of looming recession and economic distress might be of interest to more than just a few people.

While the American public is being distracted with the latest tales of Trump, the people of Hong Kong are still braving the displeasure of the police and their erstwhile political masters in Beijing, demanding that their democracy, liberty, and freedom be preserved and respected. One would think that the struggle for freedom and independence would be inherently of interest to Americans.

Give Donald Trump his earned criticisms as well. His tweets incite more than they inform, and much more than they inspire. He is a willing player in the ongoing reality show the legacy media presents as politics in America--if the media is shirking its traditional role of informing the public, Donald Trump is surely guilty of encouraging this lassitude. Rather than rising above the theatrics, Donald Trump is as guilty of creating them as the legacy media.

Between the credit and the criticism lies an important truth: being aware and informed is the responsibility of the individual. Our world is defined not by narrative but by facts, and though the media may be vested in promoting narrative, it is incumbent upon each of us to ferret out the facts. Only when we know the facts can we make reasoned and informed choices about the world in which we live, and the world in which we want to live.

Read broadly. Read critically. Read skeptically. Read always with one question in mind: "What are the facts?"

And it just may be that, if we emphasize the pursuit of facts over the consumption of narrative, we may yet inspire the media--be it the legacy media seeking to survive or the alternative media seeking to prove its worth--to prioritize facts over narrative. 

All the world may be a stage, but ultimately we are never merely just players. We are also the playwrights. We should at least strive to write a worthy play.

Bread And Circuses.

Panem et Circenses. Bread and Circuses.

Once again, the media is proving that shallow spectacle--"infotainment"--is all they have to offer. Rather than inform and facilitate sober and serious contemplation of the day's pressing issues, the legacy media offers only a steady diet of what is charitably described as "political porn"--click bait meant only to titillate.

President Trump's likely impeachment is the clown act du jour. Why is he being impeached? That is an excellent question. Apparently, Democrats are upset that he spoke on the telephone with the recently elected President of the Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, and are in high dudgeon that he requested the Ukrainian government look into possible corruption and malfeasance involving former Vice President (and current Democratic Presidential front-runner) Joe Biden and his son Hunter.

Predictably, Republicans are outraged that the Democrats are outraged. President Trump is outraged that the Democrats are outraged, and even more outraged that the legacy media is airing its sympathetic outrage over the Democratic outrage over President Trump's outrageousness.

Did you catch that important bit of news about people being outraged?  

Did you catch any other useful bit about the particulars of the incident and presumed offenses by Donald Trump? Probably not, because the facts only dribble out quite by accident.

Consider the latest breathless, pearl-clutching headlines over President Trump's phone call.

In "The Week That Everything Changed" the columnist assures us that the narrative has suddenly shifted, that the Democrats are finally on offense while the Republicans are finally on defense. She neglects, of course, to make mention of all the high dudgeon expended last summer over President Trump's seeming inability to properly berate Russian strongman Vladimir Putin in public over Russia's presumed meddling in the 2016 election--a narrative which I observed at the time was notable for the complete absence of factual support.

The author of "As Fox News goes, so goes Trump" earnestly assures us that the troglodytic commentators at the "conservative" Fox News are President Trump's only defense against the forces of Truth and Justice, but even Fox grasps the gravity of the situation, and thus is bolstering its array of talking heads with ex politicians who have a clear understanding of all that is at stake. The irony of looking to politicians to deliver clear and objective analyses of issues escapes him completely.

In "The Truth About Trump’s Insane Ukraine ‘Server’ Conspiracy", whose author is a "Senior National Security Correspondent", he pans Trump's request of President Zelensky and his mention of cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike, treating as ludicrous any notion that Crowdstrike might have erred in its forensic examination of the Democratic National Committee servers after the alleged Russian hack which purportedly resulted in volumes of DNC data being publicized via WikiLeaks. Unfortunately, this "Senior National Security Correspondent" manages to completely overlook the fact that Crowdstrike's assessment of the alleged hack, in particular the role of a pseudonymous hacker known as "Guccifer 2.0", was directly and categorically refuted in the only indictments issued over that hack, those being the indictments secured by Special Counsel Robert Mueller in July of 2018. While the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity is not a universally acknowledge body of intelligence expertise or forensic analysis, it is disingenuous for this "Senior National Security Correspondent" to gloss over the fact that VIPS made public their full analysis and the relevant source data. 

On the other side of the aisle, in "Anti-Trump media doing their best to get president impeached" we have dogged insistence that all the fracas is just a media conspiracy whose sole purpose is to get President Trump thrown out of office. President Trump, after all, is heaven sent to save America from itself. While I actually am inclined to agree with the charges of bias, having already commented at length about it with regards to the Russian Collusion Hoax and the fiasco known as the Mueller Investigation, the notion of the media being decidedly anti-Trump no longer qualifies as newsworthy. The aftermath of Robert Mueller's anti-climactic report establishing no collusion or conspiracy between President Trump's election campaign and Russian spies was littered with examples of the media promoting factually false narratives with complete disregard for facts very much in evidence at the time.

The reader will note that I do not mention these authors by name, nor do I highlight the publications from which these articles came. This is not an oversight. It is a protest of sorts--perhaps a silly one, unlikely to be an effective one, certainly a personal one. It is my way of saying "enough!" on this endless cycle of propaganda and Fake News. The articles in question I have archived on The Internet Archive's "Wayback Machine", a service which caches web content against future deletion and modification, in part to deny these sources the benefit of any more click-thrus.

The criticism I have is simple: people need facts in order to decide the truth of any matter. We need to know the Who, the What, the Where, and the When. We need to be able to puzzle out the How and the Why. In my "day job" in Information Technology, I constantly encourage my technical support staffs to focus on these basic interrogatory questions when gathering information about a problem. Gathering the data is the first and most essential step in any problem-solving paradigm.

The role of the media--be it the legacy media or the up and coming "alt-media"--is to gather and present those facts. Even a blog such as this, which focuses on presenting analyses of various issues, has a duty to itself to focus on facts. Facts are what have credibility, not the people presenting them; we gain our credibility by borrowing that of the facts--and if we are respectful of the facts, and guide our reasonings and logic in accordance with the facts, we may hope that some of the credibility enjoyed by the facts will permanently adhere to us.

The media has long since abandoned the task of presenting facts. Where Donald Trump is concerned, the media were openly scornful of even the pretense of objectivity as early as August of 2015, while he as just getting his Presidential election campaign started.

What is to be done? Gather the facts. Amazingly enough--and probably quite by accident--the facts are out there. Even the legacy media occasionally slips and manages to release verifiable factual information. Each person, each reader of this blog or of any information source, must take the time to gather facts, to question what others are saying, and the conclusions others are reaching.

As I have advised previously, "Do not trust. Verify instead." Do not accept a pronouncement merely because it comes from some presumed "expert" in the media, legacy or otherwise. Read. Think. Judge for yourself. Read my essays and decide for yourself if I am insightful or insane--and feel free to tell me which you think I am. Challenge prevailing wisdom. Take every comment made on all sides with a grain of salt.

Above all, be mindful of this one basic truth about what the legacy media especially offers: it is all just bread and circuses, a clown show designed to entertain and distract while generating ad revenue and mouse clicks. It cannot be stated too much that the media has no interest in informing you; they wish only to entertain you.

Do not trust. Verify instead.

Facts Do Not Matter Where Russia Is Concerned

There is one certain method to send Democrats and the legacy media into major meltdown mode: simply use "Trump" and "Russia" in the same sentence.  The sentence need not even be coherent or logical. The sentence works best if it does not rely on facts, for facts are simply not relevant where Russia is concerned. 

Witness the latest "bombshell scoop" from CNN, where Michael Cohen claimed to have been in the room when Donald Trump and Don, Jr., discussed meeting a Russian national with dirt on Hillary Clinton. Presumably, this now "proves" that Donald Trump is merely a Putin puppet, and all the excoriations heaped upon him by the legacy media are now justified.

What a pity none of that is true.

As has been noted on Gateway Pundit, the lead rebuttal witness against Michael Cohen is--wait for it--Michael Cohen. CNN's recent breathless reporting even makes a passing note of the obvious contradiction:

Cohen privately testified last year to two Congressional committees investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election. A source familiar with Cohen's House testimony said he did not testify that Trump had advance knowledge. Cohen's claims weren't mentioned in separate reports issued by Republicans and Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee.

However, Michael Cohen's actual statement to the Senate Intelligence Committee leaves little room for his latest revelation to be true, as he declaimed not only any knowledge of any such improprieties, but also that Donald Trump participated in any improprieties:

Given my own proximity to the President of the United States as a candidate, let me also say that I never saw anything - not a hint of anything - that demonstrated his involvement in Russian interference in our election or any form of Russian collusion.

If we assume, as the legacy media insists we must, that a meeting with a Russian claiming to have opposition research on Hillary Clinton, represents "Russian interference," then either Cohen is lying now, or he perjured himself before the Senate Intelligence Committee. The one and only escape valve that would reconcile his past and current statements is if Don, Jr.'s, now-infamous meeting at Trump Tower is in fact not an instance of Russian meddling--a conclusion which immediately topples the entirety of the Russian collusion narrative. 

Cohen is not the only factual problem faced in perpetuating the current hysteria over Russia.  Even Special Counsel Robert Mueller's latest round of indictments, alleging a dozen Russian intelligence agents hacked the DNC computers and released several embarrassing documents retrieved from those systems, runs afoul of earlier claims and assertions made regarding Russia.

Mueller's indictments specifically allege that the named Russian agents used a hacker known as "Guccifer 2.0" to facilitate leaking the stolen data:

Beginning in or around June 2016, the Conspirators staged and released tens of thousands of the stolen emails and documents. They did so using fictitious online personas, including “DCLeaks” and “Guccifer 2.0.”

However, not only does the original forensic analysis by Crowdstrike identify two different Russian hacking entities--"Cozy Bear" and "Fancy Bear"--thus discounting the claimed involvement of the Guccifer persona, but further analysis of Guccifer-related material by cyber security firm ThreatConnect explicitly discounts Guccifer's involvement.  ThreatConnect's conclusion is that Guccifer is an intentional distraction from the "real" Russian cyberattack:

Although the proof is not conclusive, we assess Guccifer 2.0 most likely is a Russian denial and deception (D&D) effort that has been cast to sow doubt about the prevailing narrative of Russian perfidy. While targeting political campaigns for espionage purposes is not new, the greatest concern would be the use of the Guccifer 2.0 persona to leak documents of questionable integrity and authenticity in an effort to manipulate the outcome of the U.S. presidential election.

Both the Mueller indictments and the Crowdstrike/ThreatConnect analysis are themselves challenged by analyses performed by the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, which makes the case that the "hack" was in fact an inside job: 

Forensic studies of “Russian hacking” into Democratic National Committee computers last year reveal that on July 5, 2017, data was leaked (not hacked) by a person with physical access to DNC computers, and then doctored to incriminate Russia.

As I have observed before, the VIPS memorandum is one of the few analyses which can be independently assessed, as the source materials are made available to public scrutiny--a quality noticeably lacking in the Crowdstrike report and ThreatConnect's complementary analysis.

In almost every regard, the current narrative of Russian electoral interference is contradicted by the 2017 version of that same narrative. Even if we assume that Russian meddling happened (an assumption which must be regarded as problematic, given the VIPS memorandum), we are still confronted with reconciling past and current reporting regarding said meddling. As with Michael Cohen's latest claims, the 2018 narrative can only be true if the 2017 narrative is false. Mueller's indictments of Russian agents can only be sustained if the Crowdstrike analysis of the DNC hack is refuted.

For the rationally-minded, this will not do. Historical facts do not change--the past is always permanently etched in stone. Understanding can only come when all established facts are scrutinized and reconciled--something the legacy media has not even attempted to do. Whatever malfeasance Russia may have done is not revealed by a constantly evolving and incomplete recitation of the underlying facts. A case for impeaching--or defending--President Trump is not advanced by a constantly evolving and incomplete recitation of the underlying facts. Strengthening measures for guaranteeing the integrity of our elections cannot happen when there is a constantly evolving and incomplete recitation of the underlying facts. 

Despite the rantings that pass for reporting among the legacy media, we must look at the facts--all of the facts--without regard to the conclusions they support if we are to come to a full understanding of them. Regardless of the hyperventilations of the legacy media, the facts--and only the facts--matter.

There stands President Trump. What Crime Has ANYONE Found?

Lavrentiy Beria, head of the NKVD under Josef Stalin (The Soviet Union's secret police and precursor to the infamous KGB), is often cited as having said "show me the man and I'll find you the crime."

We should be mindful of these words in regarding the broad authority granted Robert Mueller in his appointment as Special Counsel for the US Department of Justice, charged with investigating possible "collusion" between the campaign staffs of Donald Trump and Russia. We should be mindful for the simple reason that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, at the time of Mueller's appointment, explicitly discounted any presumption that any criminal offense had even taken place:

“In my capacity as acting Attorney General, I determined that it is in the public interest for me to exercise my authority and appoint a Special Counsel to assume responsibility for this matter,” said Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein. “My decision is not a finding that crimes have been committed or that any prosecution is warranted. I have made no such determination. What I have determined is that based upon the unique circumstances, the public interest requires me to place this investigation under the authority of a person who exercises a degree of independence from the normal chain of command.”

Mueller's appointment was never even an assertion that a crime had been committed, much less that President Trump had committed one.  This alone made Mueller's appointment something of a legal oddity, for the federal statute governing the appointments of Special Counsel, 28 CFR § 600.1, specifically references criminal investigations:

The Attorney General, or in cases in which the Attorney General is recused, the Acting Attorney General, will appoint a Special Counsel when he or she determines that criminal investigation of a person or matter is warranted....

Moreover, the investigation must be grounded in a specific crime (or at least the allegation of a crime), as 28 CFR § 600.4(a), requires some specificity as to the subject of investigation:

The jurisdiction of a Special Counsel shall be established by the Attorney General. The Special Counsel will be provided with a specific factual statement of the matter to be investigated....

Former US Attorney Andrew McCarthy highlighted these apparent defects of Mueller's appointment in a 2017 piece for the National Review, and I encourage those wanting a fuller understanding of the legal issues to read it.  I highlight these points merely to underscore the "Beria-esque" nature of Mueller's appointment: He was shown Donald Trump, and challenged to find the crime.

After a year (and an untold number of millions of dollars spent), the question now becomes: "What crime has Mueller found?"  What crime has anyone found? What credible accusation of criminal offense may now be laid at President Trump's feet?

The answer appears to be: none. There is no crime alleged. There is no accusation to be made.

Consider the tangible fruits of the Mueller probe to date:  

• George Papadopoulos, a foreign policy advisor to the Trump campaign, pleaded guilty in October 2017 to making false statements to the FBI.
• Michael Flynn, President Trump's one-time national security advisor, pleaded guilty in December of 2017 to making false statements to the FBI.
• Rick Gates, business partner and lieutenant to Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort, plead guilty in February 2018 to one count of making false statements and one count of "conspiracy against the United States", both charges arising out of political consulting work Manafort and Gates provided to Ukrainian politicians several years ago--work wholly unrelated to either the Trump campaign or the 2016 election cycle as a whole.
• Richard Pinedo, someone with no known affiliation to either Donald Trump or the Trump campaign, pled guilty to a charge of identity theft, in connection with a series of indictments Mueller announced involving a number of Russian nationals and Russian-based companies.
• Alex van der Zwann, also with no known affiliation to Donald Trump or the Trump campaign, pled guilty to making false statements to the FBI.

These represent the sum total of prosecutorial "wins" Mueller has obtained as a result of his investigation.  Not one of these guilty pleas even hints at a larger crime or conspiracy having been perpetrated by President Trump or members of his campaign staff.  As regards President Trump, Mueller has failed to even allege any crime.

Mueller's investigation has also resulted in the following criminal indictments:

• One-time Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort was indicted in October of 2017 on a number of charges, including money laundering and making false statements, all in relation to work done long before his involvement with Donald Trump's Presidential campaign.
• Manafort associate Konstantin Kilimnik, was indicted in June of 2018 with obstruction of justice, purportedly by attempting to tamper with potential witnesses in the Manafort case.
• In February of 2018, Mueller indicted 13 Russian nationals and three Russian entities on charges of conspiring to interfere with “US political and electoral processes, including the presidential election of 2016.” However, it must be noted that, in announcing the indictments, the Department of Justice explicitly excluded any allegation of any American--including Trump campaign operatives--being a willing party to the criminal acts alleged: "There is no allegation in the indictment that any American was a knowing participant in the alleged unlawful activity. There is no allegation in the indictment that the charged conduct altered the outcome of the 2016 election. "
• In July of 2018, Rod Rosenstein announced indictments of 12 Russian GRU intelligence agents on charges surrounding the alleged hack of the DNC servers in the spring and early summer of 2016.  As with the February indictments, American involvement was specifically discounted: "There is no allegation in the indictment that any American was a knowing participant in the alleged unlawful activity or knew they were communicating with Russian intelligence officers."

27 individuals and three companies indicted, and none of the indictments even hint at a crime committed by Donald Trump or his campaign staffs.  Moreover, in announcing both sets of Russian indictments, the Department of Justice specifically rejected the possibility that the alleged activities influenced the outcome of the election, stating outright that "there is no allegation in the indictment that the charged conduct altered the vote count or changed the outcome of the 2016 election." Even if every single indictment results in a conviction, not a single one points to any criminal conduct by President Trump or his associates.  A year after Mueller was shown Donald Trump, he has failed to find any crime.

Nor has anyone else managed to find an actual crime.  Outside of the Mueller investigation, the most notable potential source of wrongdoing is the allegation that President Trump had an affair with porn star Stormy Daniels in 2006, and possibly another with Playboy model Karen McDougal. Because of payments made to Daniels and McDougal, arranged by Trump lawyer and "fixer" Michael Cohen, during the fall of 2016, there has been some intimation of campaign finance violations, but even that becomes highly problematic given Cohen's revelation of recorded conversations with Donald Trump discussing such payments.  Even if the allegations themselves are true, adultery is not a crime.

It is disingenuous and facile to say that Donald Trump "may have" committed crimes, either in relation to Russian involvement in the 2016 election or with regards to his supposed mistresses.  Strictly as an hypothetical, that is always true, not just of Donald Trump but of anyone.  However, crime is not an hypothetical.  Crime is factual. Accusations of crime require there be a date, a place, a time, and a law that has been broken. Accusations of crime require there be facts.  So far, there have been no facts that even identify a crime that Donald Trump could plausibly have committed.

Lawyer after lawyer has been shown Donald Trump, and lawyer after lawyer has failed to find a crime. Maybe there is a crime lurking just out of sight, and maybe it will be soon brought to light.  Maybe.

For now, the reality is there are no crimes that can be alleged against Donald Trump.