Bookworm Room

Conservatives deal with facts and reach conclusions; liberals have conclusions and sell them as facts.

Voting strategically in the mid-term election, especially in California

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If you like Trump’s accomplishments and hate the Dems’ Kavanaugh circus, vote strategically this November. Here are some ideas for the mid-term election.

Mid-Term ElectionWe’re slightly less than a month away from the mid-term election. For those who have put off thinking about it, it’s time! As a nation, we are at a fork in the road, so people need to think very seriously about their choices.

The most important thing is that, contrary to the saying that “all politics is local,” this is not a local election. For once, it’s not about whether your particular Congress critter brings home the bacon to your district. Instead, the only thing that matters in this election is whether it gives Trump a Congress that will work with him or gives him a Congress that will work against him.

Even that, though, isn’t the correct formulation. Trump is the agent of the American people. This mid-term election is about you as an American, not you as a resident of this county or that state.

To paraphrase Ronald Reagan, as we head into the mid-terms, you need to ask yourself whether you as an American are better off now than you were two years ago. If you are, then you must support Trump to enable him to continue the policies that benefit you and the nation as a whole.

Regardless of your personal feelings about Trump, therefore, you need to take a step back and see if you objectively like or dislike what he’s done for America as a whole. The following is an off-the-top-of-my-head list of Trump’s accomplishments to help you decide whether you mostly support or mostly oppose what he’s done during his time in office: [Read more…]

Sunlight is the best disinfectant: Trump’s order declassifying documents

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Trump’s order declassifying documents related to the “Russia Collusion” narrative is the best way to destroy Deep State bullies and reveal government rot.

Illustrated edition Trump not a sexual predator Congress Mueller declassifying documentsI am delighted that Donald Trump issued a sweeping order declassifying a huge bolus of documents related to the Russia probe:

The documents ordered declassified are a handful of pages of the June 2017 application to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to continue surveillance of Trump campaign aide Carter Page, which originally began in 2016. Trump also ordered all FBI reports of interviews prepared in connection with all surveillance applications of Page be declassified and released.

Trump also ordered that all FBI reports of interviews prepared in connection with all Page surveillance applications be released.

Trump also ordered the declassification of all FBI reports of interviews DOJ official Bruce Ohr prepared in connection with the Russia investigation. Ohr had a close relationship with former British spy Christopher Steele, the author of the dossier connection Trump to Russia. Steele was hired by Fusion GPS, the same opposition research firm that Bruce Ohr’s wife, Nellie Ohr, was contracted by.

Trump also directed the Justice Department and FBI “to publicly release all text messages relating to the Russia investigation, without redaction,” of Comey and Ohr, as well as former FBI Deputy Director Andre McCabe.

The text messages of Peter Strzok and Lisa Page were also ordered to be released without redaction. Strzok and Page were both part of the FBI’s investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server, as well as the Russia investigation.

Sadly, the DOJ and FBI can still drag their feet on this (which I guess explains why he issued the order now. making it a September surprise, and not closer to the election): [Read more…]

Bookworm Beat 7/31/2018 — a “world is going crazy” wrap-up

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The world is indeed going crazy — but mixed in with the Left’s bad stuff, this Bookworm Beat also has things that are both interesting and good.

Bookworm Beat Woman WritingWe need to take federal funds out of America’s colleges and universities. Exhibit A for this proposal is a long, long, utterly fascinating article that Milo Yiannopoolos has written about the war that the hard-Left, identity-politics driven, social justice warriors are waging within the confines of medieval studies. While medieval studies may sound arcane, the reality is that the article describes in microcosm the vicious, Marxist battles taking place in every college and university — all of which are taxpayer-funded.

This Leftist academic coup needs to stop, which is another reason to vote Republican in the fall. I doubt a Republican Congress will stop the funds, but they’ll still be better than Democrats, who are open in their demands that all colleges be free and that this Marxist crap get full taxpayer funding.

A spirit stronger than the Holocaust. Anyone who survived the Holocaust has an amazing story. Menachem Z. Rosensaft’s father has a more amazing story than most.

I’ve often said that those of us whose parents experienced WWII first hand are the last of the WWII generation. When we go, there is no one left to remember, whether first hand or second hand.

Brennan’s CIA and the attack on Trump. A friend insisted that I read Michael Isikoff’s and David Corn’s Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin’s War on America and the Election of Donald Trump. If those names are familiar to you, it’s because they were part of publicizing the Steele dossier so that the FBI, in making its FISA application, could claim two sources to justify the application to spy on Carter Page, not just one. David Corn is also a long-time writer associated with Mother Jones and The Nation, so that gives you an idea of his political orientation. Isikoff is the man who sat on the blue dress story lest it embarrass Bill Clinton.

I’ve only read the book’s introduction and the first chapter so far, but I’m finding it hard to keep a straight face as I go. It’s an amalgam of gossip, innuendo, insults, and meaningless anecdotes, all aimed at creating an aura of “badness” around Trump. What makes the book especially ludicrous is that, since its publication, we’ve learned more about the FISA application, we’ve had all sorts of admissions that Obama knew what was going on and did nothing lest it harm Hillary’s candidacy, we’ve seen Trump use his carrot and stick approach to many leaders he finds hostile to America’s well-being, and we’ve seen him make life more difficult for Putin than any other past leader, especially Obama.

Oh, and we’ve learned that Brennan is a corrupt Swamp creature, who was quite possibly one of the architects of an attempted coup against an American president. [Read more…]

Do ordinary Americans take seriously the Left’s Russia hysteria?

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After today’s meeting between Trump and Putin, Leftists have ratcheted their Russia hysteria up to level 12 out of 10. Do ordinary Americans care?

Trump Putin RussiaI’m so old I can remember when Teddy Kennedy, the revered lion of the Senate, during the height of the Cold War asked the Soviets to intervene in the 1984 presidential election.

I’m so old I can remember when Democrats constantly castigated conservatives for being paranoid about Soviet interference into world and American affairs.

I’m so old I can remember when Democrats and their fellow travelers brushed off stories about Soviet atrocities as mere Cold War propaganda.

I’m so old I can remember when we were told Communism is just another type of government and we should be more open to the Soviets and that the Cold War was a sorry relic of a fascist American past.

I’m so old I can remember when Obama sent Hillary Clinton off to meet the Russians with a big red reset button.

I’m so old I can remember when Barack Obama met with Putin and had these nice things to say:

“I’m aware of not only the extraordinary work that you’ve done on behalf of the Russian people … as president, but in your current role as prime minister,” Obama said during a breakfast meeting at Putin’s country home on the outskirts of Moscow. “We think there’s an excellent opportunity to put U.S.-Russian relations on a much stronger footing.”

I’m so old I can remember when Hillary authorized selling 20% of America’s uranium to a Russian oligarch close to Vladimir Putin in exchange for a massive cash infusion into her private slush fund.

I’m so old I can remember when Mitt Romney said Russia was our greatest geopolitical foe and President Obama sneeringly replied that “the 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back. Because the Cold War has been over for 20 years.”

I’m so old I can remember when Barack Obama, during a meeting with outgoing Russian President Medvedev, was caught on a hot mic asking that Medvedev tell incoming President Putin that Putin needed to “give me space” so Obama could betray former Soviet bloc countries on missile defense and promised “more flexibility” after the 2012 election. [Read more…]

Obama On Meddling In The 2016 Election

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Russian meddling in the election only became an issue after Trump won.  Obama had pointed advice for Trump during the campaign season.

(h/t Althouse)  As quoted in a tweet today by President Trump, pointing out that Obama did not consider Russian “meddling” important during the campaign, nor did he take any action regarding it until after the election . . . when it suddenly became the only possible explanation for Hillary’s loss.

Mueller’s First Indictments – Some Answers and Some Predictable Media Spin

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The Mueller indictments show that no American conspired with the Russians — and that the Russians successfully acted to “sow discord” in the U.S. political system.

After suffering through a year of hysteria and the disruption of our national politics by our neo-Marxist progs trying to undo the election, Americans deserve the entire truth about what happened.  We received some of it yesterday when  the Special Counsel delivered his first series of indictments against thirteen Russian nationals, working through two Russian front corporations, for crimes relating to interference with the 2016 election.

The indictments go a long way, though not all the way, to clearing the Trump campaign of conspiring with the Russians.  They put the Russian efforts into context — their operation was small.  The facts definitively establish that Russian support of Trump was a by-product, not an end goal of the operation.  Equally important, Rod Rosenstein explicitly stated that no American citizen, let alone anyone in the Trump campaign, was knowingly complicit in the actions described in the indictment.

One of the striking things to come out of the indictment was how small the Russian operation was.  In terms of money and manpower, it was an operation involving 13 named defendants and several hundred employees working through two Russian corporate entities, all on a combined budget of no more than $2 million a month from 2014 through the end of 2016 (Indictment, ¶¶ 10-11).  To put that into perspective, during 2016 campaign, candidates on both sides, along with their supporters and PACs, spent hundreds of millions during the primaries; then they spent $2.65 billion during the four+ month general election season.  It does not seem possible that such limited scale Russian activities would have made the slightest difference to the outcome of the 2016 election.  And indeed, Rod Rosenstein, in announcing the indictments, explicitly stated that there is nothing in the indictment to suggest that the activities of the Russians had any impact on the outcome of the 2016 elections. [Read more…]

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Trump: the Russia collusion story needs to end soon

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Available facts indicate that the Progressives’ Russia Collusion narrative is fake — and time is running out to investigate the true Clinton/FBI collusion.

With questions swirling around the Trump-Russian collusion narrative, we seem to be living in a John le Carré novel.  It is one full of spies where the truth is hidden deep beneath disinformation and, ironically enough, behind security protocols.  And just like a le Carré novel, it seems that there are many people in this mix determined that the truth should never see the light of day.

Is Trump a Russian intelligence asset with a taste for Russian prostitutes and golden showers who stole the 2016 election with help from Russia?  Perhaps.  But given the dearth of evidence supporting that contention after twenty months of investigation, another, better question arises: Is the Trump Russia collusion narrative the single most dirty — and criminal — trick in the history of American politics?  It would be intellectually dishonest in the extreme to say that only one of those questions deserves investigation.

Was the Russian collusion narrative started, then spoon fed to the FBI and the media, as a way to make Hillary seem less corrupt in comparison to Trump during the 2016 election campaign?  Was the narrative then pushed as hard as possible after the election as a way to delegitimize the Trump presidency; to serve as a vehicle to overturn the 2016 election results, and to protect people in government who had acted unethically, and perhaps criminally, as regards all things Hillary — i.e., those responsible for the criminal travesty that was the FBI/DOJ investigation and exoneration of Hillary for her email scandal, those who allowed the Uranium One deal to be approved without notifying Congress of related Russian corruption, and those DOJ officials who defied the recommendations of FBI field agents to open an investigation of the Clinton Foundation?

Let me note here, before you start measuring me for a tin-foil hat, I am not alleging some grand conspiracy involving the FBI, CIA, ODNI, and others.  If this was a political dirty trick, then the truth is likely being held in a death-grip of secrecy among a handful of conspirators, they most likely being no more than one or two people in the leadership of the DNC and Clinton Campaigns, perhaps CIA Director John Brennan and/or Glen Simpson of Fusion GPS, and/or Christopher Steele.  As to everyone else who then picked up this narrative and ran with it, sometimes unlawfully, that was not a conspiracy.  Far more likely it simply grew out of the partisan culture created throughout the government agencies by the Obama administration.  That culture, as Ms. BWR has fairly described it, is one of bias, entitlement, arrogance, and corruption, at least to the extent that ideological ends have at times justified patently unlawful means.  I believe Ms. BWR’s description also covers about 90% of the mainstream media as well.

Just to review, there are precious few factual allegations regarding the Trump Russia collusion narrative beyond the bald allegation that Trump was a Russian asset, a narrative Fusion’s Glen Simpson claims was known all over Moscow and was just there for the picking in June 2016.  People were “talking about it freely.”  (Sen. p87-88).  Amazing that Simpson and Steele were able to uncover that in a week whereas the CIA and NSA were blissfully ignorant during the eight years that Trump is alleged to have acted as a Russian agent, eh?

The people Steele names as active in the Russia Trump collusion are Carter Page, Paul Manafort, and Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen.  Steele mentions Michael Flynn, but only in passing as someone the Kremlin was cultivating.  Steele alludes to two others, someone in the Trump campaign who “admitt[ed that the] Kremlin [was] behind [the] recent appearance of DNC emails on Wikileaks,” later claimed to be George Papadopoulos, and someone “close” to Trump who knew of his intelligence relationship with Russia, later asserted to be Sergei Millian.

As to specific acts alleged by Steele, there are only four that directly relate to Trump (at least by my count, ten by count of the Washington Times).  The first specific act alleged is that Trump engaged Russian hookers to do a golden shower in his Moscow hotel room in 2013.  The second is that Carter Page traveled to Russia in order to meet Igor Sechin, President of Rosneft, and a Russian political official, Diveykin.  The third is that George Papadopoulos admitted to knowing that Russia was behind the DNC Wikileaks affair.  And the fourth is that Michael Cohen met in Prague with Russian officials in the last week of August or first week of September. [Read more…]

The Russia collusion — emerging facts finally jive with obvious motives *UPDATED*

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The real Russia collusion — Obama and Clinton team with Russia against Trump — makes sense if you look at the motives driving the various actors.

Russia Collusion Hillary Putin bribes reveal Trump Derangement SyndromeDa Vinci once said that “Every action needs to be prompted by a motive.” Motive is certainly a helpful tool when it comes to bringing an organizing principle to the sprawling, chaotic Russia collusion — the real Russia collusion. The real one isn’t the fake claim that Trump, who had no contacts in Russia, partnered with Putin, who had no reason to root for Trump, during the 2016 election cycle. Instead, I’m talking about the real Russia collusion, one that sees more evidence every day to support it. This is the one that says that Obama and Hillary, along with all their high level minions, conspired with Russia to keep Trump out of the White House.

You might not believe it from my blog silence about the unfolding Russian collusion, but I am paying attention. I daily read multiple articles analyzing the Nunes Memo, and the Grassley-Graham letter. I try to keep track of the cast of players: (1) the various swamp crawlers, from Hillary to Blumenthal to Brennan to Simpson to Shearer; (2) the surprise guest appearances from Obama administration players such as Rice, Lynch, and (3) the rotating cast of regular players at the FBI and the DOJ, from Comey to Strzok to Mueller. Looking at it this way, it’s pretty clear that one of the things that’s truly Russian about this whole scandal is that it has the complexity and character count you’d find in War and Peace or some other epic Russian novel.

After reading and reading and reading, I have to admit that I’m still confused about the specifics (timing, facts, lies, laws lying in smoking ruins, etc.). Nevertheless, the overarching picture emerges clearly from this welter of data: Trump did not collude with the Russians to win the election or betray America, although there were people who were temporarily on the very periphery of Trump’s campaign who would have liked to have seen Trump be even more friendly to Russia than Obama and Hillary already were. Instead, it was the Hillary team, with help from the Obama administration, that either colluded with Russia or were Russia’s patsies in trying to set up Trump.

Understanding which is the real Russian conspiracy has the unexpected byproduct of bringing people’s obvious or known motives into alignment with the emerging facts. The original story, the one that had Trump as the conspirator, never made sense, because neither he nor Putin had a motive to do what they were alleged to have done. Thus, it never made sense that Putin would collude against a Hillary presidency. Indeed, the last thing Russia wanted was for Trump to win. After all, despite his stated willingness to work with Putin, Trump was shaping up to be a nightmare for Putin for one very specific reason: Drill, baby, drill.

Under Putin’s corrupt oligarchy, the Russian economy is a wasteland. Its main reliable source of wealth is oil. The Obama administration’s ongoing efforts to destroy America’s oil-producing abilities were a boon to the Russians. Trump’s stated desire to bring America’s oil back on-line was something Putin would have wanted to avoid at all costs. It was also unclear whether Trump would continue to follow Obama’s lead when it came to Ukraine, Central Europe generally, Syria, and Iran — in all of which locales Obama had withdrawn from traditional American friends or funded foes and, when possible, handed power to Russia.

That’s why, when Steele and others (Brennan? Shearer?) came sniffing around seeking dirt on Trump, Putin and his spymasters must have been beyond thrilled. They knew Hillary could be bought; they knew Hillary would continue Obama’s effort to handicap America’s energy industry; they assumed that Hillary would follow Obama’s disreputable patterns towards traditional American friends and foes; and they probably had enough blackmail material on Hillary to last for six terms, not just one or two. (Not the least of which, as Trump pointedly joked during the campaign, would have been those 30,000 emails Hillary erased from her unprotected server, but which the Russians had probably hacked years before. Even without that, the Russians almost certainly had information about Bill’s myriad indiscretions, Benghazi, and the whole Clinton Foundation.)

Motive is even easier to find with Obama and Hillary. Obama had a legacy to preserve. Obama, who has never been a fool although he is a knave, understood that his legacy was built on sand. Except for Obamacare, he had no major legislation. All he had were executive orders, regulations, “Dear colleague” letters, and a host of other ephemeral directives that would become embedded in America culture only if a subsequent administration made it clear to true believers in government and education that these legal simulacra needed to stay to complete America’s fundamental transformation.

As for Hillary — well, heck, Hillary understands that, if you want to win, you have to cheat. She didn’t cheat hard enough in 2008, but in 2016, by God! She was going to cheat and she was going to cheat big, thanks in large part to the Obama administration’s willingness to support her win at all costs philosophy.

So, if you want motive for collusion, you have it with the Obama administration, the Hillary campaign, and the Putin administration. All of them had a vested interested in ensuring that Trump lost.

But one still has to ask why would career civil servants be so willing to join in? Sure, Trump talked about trimming back the civil service, but everyone talked about it and nobody did anything about it. I think there must have been more than mere job security at issue for same many upper ranking members of the FBI and the DOJ willingly to jettison laws, procedures, and their own past histories of relatively upright behavior.

Before I go on, let me say that I’m not talking about people such as Brennan, whom I believe to be completely corrupt, or truly evil hangers-on such as Blumenthal and Shearer. I’m talking about the others, including people like Comey and Mueller. They were always political and played hard ball to advance their careers, and they were unethical in a “cut-throat office politics” sort of way, but no matter how one points out their viciousness and failures of intelligence, before now, they’d never crossed the line. Had they walked right up to it and put their toes on it? You bet. But cross it ? No.

So what happened? [Read more…]

Dueling headlines: Uranium One and Frederica Wilson

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Perhaps the most shocking thing of all about the Uranium One corruption scandal is the drive-by media’s deliberate effort to hide the story from the public.

Uranium One Nuclear warningThe following headlines are only a slight exaggeration. I’ve used “The Hill,” which broke the Uranium One story, as a representative of those few outlets covering a fact-filled report painting a picture of a staggeringly corrupt Obama administration, which knew that Hillary was selling off America’s national security for her own benefit, and not only did not stop the deal, but took great care to hide it.

The Hill: FBI insider reveals that Uranium One deal resulted from extortion and bribery

MSM: Rep. Frederica Wilson – “Donald Trump said a Green Beret deserved to die”

The Hill: Former Sec’y of State Hillary Clinton approved Uranium One deal after Russians put millions in the Clinton Fund

MSM: “Trump said ‘Suck it up’ to Gold Star widow,” claims Frederica Wilson

The Hill: Obama administration approved Uranium One deal despite FBI info about extortion and bribery

MSM: Lying Trump denies that he said a Green Beret deserved to die

The Hill: Bill Clinton was having private meetings with Russians during Uranium One sale negotiations

MSM: Donald Trump lied about other presidents never calling Gold Star families

The Hill: When FBI discovered a Russian spy ring, Sec’y of State Clinton rushed spies back to safety in Russia [Read more…]

Catching up on trends at WOW Magazine, home of the Watcher’s Council

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If you haven’t swung by WOW Magazine lately, maybe today’s the day. Watcher’s Council members have turned a gimlet eye to today’s issues.

Watcher's Council WOW! Magazine

[MUST-SEE VIDEO] Gen. John Kelly’s press briefing is essential viewing

Trump Politicizing Our Military? The Real Story

Tucker Carlson Tonight: Peter Schweizer, Nancy Soderberg on Obama Admin, Clintons’ Russia Uranium One Deal

Bowe Bergdahl Pleads Guilty To Desertion And Misbehavior

Bookworm Beat 10/18/17 — the illustrated edition

Fame to Blame for Lynyrd Skynyrd Airplane Crash October 20, 1977

Two reports yesterday highlight Trump Derangement Syndrome

John Kelly blasts Frederica Wilson for eavesdropping on Trump’s call to Soldier’s widow & attacks.

Must See Video: Roger Stone Gives An Amazing Speech On Tour With Milo

Why the Lights Are Still Off in Puerto Rico (video)

Dear Men, I truly love you, but I don’t necessarily trust you

A rotating cast of stock-players in the Weinstein scandal — guest post by Lulu

Is the Sisterhood Choreographing the Harvey Weinstein Reflex?

Argentina: Where is Santiago Maldonado?

Two reports yesterday highlight Trump Derangement Syndrome

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A snapshot of Trump Derangement Syndrome: the different responses to reports about Trump’s alleged insensitivity versus Hillary’s selling America to Russia.

Hillary Putin bribes reveal Trump Derangement SyndromeYesterday’s news broke two stories, one detailing massive national security infractions involving Russians during the Obama administration and one reporting the claim that Trump was insensitive to the widow of a Green Beret who died in the line of duty. The response to these two stories on my Facebook feed was predictable and depressing.

News story No. 1 was a fully-sourced report about the utterly corrupt way in which the Russians went about obtaining rights in American uranium during the Obama administration:

Before the Obama administration approved a controversial deal in 2010 giving Moscow control of a large swath of American uranium, the FBI had gathered substantial evidence that Russian nuclear industry officials were engaged in bribery, kickbacks, extortion and money laundering designed to grow Vladimir Putin’s atomic energy business inside the United States, according to government documents and interviews.

Federal agents used a confidential U.S. witness working inside the Russian nuclear industry to gather extensive financial records, make secret recordings and intercept emails as early as 2009 that showed Moscow had compromised an American uranium trucking firm with bribes and kickbacks in violation of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, FBI and court documents show.

They also obtained an eyewitness account — backed by documents — indicating Russian nuclear officials had routed millions of dollars to the U.S. designed to benefit former President Bill Clinton’s charitable foundation during the time Secretary of State Hillary Clinton served on a government body that provided a favorable decision to Moscow, sources told The Hill.

The racketeering scheme was conducted “with the consent of higher level officials” in Russia who “shared the proceeds” from the kickbacks, one agent declared in an affidavit years later.

Although fully aware of these corrupt practices, including Hillary’s weighing in on a matter that personally benefited, the Obama administration still gave the nod to a deal that put increased Russia’s nuclear power at America’s expense. The story was buried. That it came out now was because of a whistle-blower.

The above story is uncontested, disgraceful, and not subject to any interpretation other than realizing that Obama ran a corrupt administration, one that benefited his cronies, and that he did so to America’s major detriment. It certainly explains, though, why Obama of all people has been relatively silent about the post-election anti-Russia hysteria (and highlights what an idiot Hillary is that she can’t let the subject drop).

And of course, this report ought to resonate strongly with all those people who’ve been terribly worried for the past year about Russia’s malevolent influence within America. That they cannot make themselves comment upon it says that they’re focus on Russia was driven by Trump Derangement Syndrome, not a concern about America’s well-being or about how Russia can endanger America. [Read more…]

With Trump’s presidency, unfalsifiable Progressive delusions thrive

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The banal news that Donald Trump Jr tried to get dirt on Hillary exposes Progressive delusions as a collective dementia unresponsive to actual facts.

Progressive Hysteria, Mass Delusions, War of the Worlds Orson WellesIn 1848, Charles Mackay published Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. The preface to his first edition explains the idea behind the title:

THE OBJECT OF THE AUTHOR in the following pages has been to collect the most remarkable instances of those moral epidemics which have been excited, sometimes by one cause and sometimes by another, and to show how easily the masses have been led astray, and how imitative and gregarious men are, even in their infatuations and crimes.

Four years later, when a second edition came out, Mackay expanded upon the notion of collective delusions:

IN READING THE HISTORY OF NATIONS, we find that, like individuals, they have their whims and their peculiarities; their seasons of excitement and recklessness, when they care not what they do. We find that whole communities suddenly fix their minds upon one object, and go mad in its pursuit; that millions of people become simultaneously impressed with one delusion, and run after it, till their attention is caught by some new folly more captivating than the first.

Having established his predicate, Mackay described some of history’s best known mass delusions, including “The Mississippi Scheme,” “The South Sea Bubble,” and “The Tulipomania.” Had Mackay  lived long enough, he would undoubtedly have written about Florida’s land boom in the 1920s or Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds’ broadcast. I like to think, too, that had he lived into the 21st century, he would have written about Climate Change madness and, most recently, the Progressives’ Russia hysteria.

Before I delve more deeply into this subject, I need to make clear that I’m talking about genuine delusions, rather than mistakes, misunderstandings, or bias. A delusion is when an alternate reality occupies the brain and refuses to be displaced.

For example, whenever my mother was in the hospital, she suffered from “sundowning,” a common problem for elderly people in hospitals. (It’s also a regular problem for people with Alzheimer’s and other types of dementia.) For those who are hospitalized, starting as they are from a point of illness and, usually, fear, their older brains have a hard time processing the hospital environment.

Not only is the hospital an unfamiliar place, its rhythms are antithetical to natural biorhythms. Lights are on all the time, food appears at random times, patients are woken up at all hours of the day and night and, of course, there are drugs, lots of drugs. The elderly tend to hold things together during the day but, at night, their brains rebel and they start having serious hallucinations.

One of my mother’s hallucinations was that two German physicians came into her room to examine her. When they heard me coming, though, they quickly left through the other door so that they would not have to interact with me.

From my point of view, the beauty of this delusion was that it was provably wrong. The room had only one door. The “other door” to which she referred was a window that looked out over three stories. In this, the hallucination differed from some of her others, which involved nurses locking her in dungeons overnight or aliens taking over my body during the night. I truly thought that, armed with this indisputable fact, I could put to rest her fear that those German doctors were going to harm her.

What both fascinated and frustrated me was that no proof could dissuade my mother that the German doctors hadn’t been in her room and then left through a third floor window. It was as if a part of her brain had been hijacked by the delusion and was incapable of accepting countervailing data. For her, there was no mistake, misunderstanding, or bad dream. There was only a fact — an utterly wrong, easily falsifiable fact — but in her brain it lived and there it would stay, frightening her a great deal, until the day she died.

Is there any difference between my mother’s delusion and the Progressives’ Russia delusions when it comes to Donald Trump? I don’t think so. [Read more…]

Media damns itself with reports about Trump leaking classified information

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Digging into the known facts about Trump’s alleged leak of classified information, shows media bias and hints that the Deep State is spying on Trump.

Trump classified information leakI always wait 24 hours before commenting on the Left’s latest bout of hysteria because, since Trump became president, those hysterical outbursts are invariably wrong. In the case of Trump’s alleged spillage of classified information to the Russians, everything reported has been wrong or is highly suspect in that it shows a concerted inside effort to destroy the presidency. Here’s my take on what happened:

President Trump, General McMaster, and Secretary of State Tillerson met in the Oval Office with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. The Oval Office is supposed to be a secured room, but that’s becoming doubtful.

During the meeting, which covered the two country’s shared concerns about ISIS and other Islamic radicals, Trump told the Russians that there was information on the ground that was favorable to us. Both McMaster and Tillerson, who were present at the meeting, strenuously contend that Trump did not relay any highly classified information.

However, even if Trump had chosen to report classified information, that would have been within his purview as the Chief Executive Officer in charge of America’s intelligence apparatus. That is, the President, not the intelligence agencies (and not a certain former Secretary of State), gets to decide what’s classified information and what’s not.

Within a short time of the meeting’s conclusion, and right in time for the Washington Post’s 5:00 afternoon deadline, people who were not present at the meeting got in touch with the WaPo. These unnamed people are allegedly former intelligence officers, which means that they worked for Obama and probably do not hold current security clearance, and current intelligence officers, who almost certainly were hired during the Obama era and whose status regarding classified material is unknown. [Read more…]

The Bookworm Beat 4/7/17 — the “it’s good news when Donald Trump is president” edition and open thread

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For 8 years, my open threads have been depressing. This one, though, had me feeling remarkably cheerful as there’s a lot of good news under President Trump.

Donald Trump at CPAC 2016I am very pleased with the airstrike President Trump ordered in Syria. Chemical weapons are a national security threat to every nation in the world, no matter where they are deployed. Every nation has an obligation to act against them.

All poison gasses are nasty, but sarin is particularly horrible. There’s are whole Generations of Xs, Ys, and Zs, not to mention the millennials and post-millenials, who have no memory of the 1995 sarin attack in the Tokyo subway. I remember, though, how dreadful it was — and how easy it was to loose that chemical on a civilian population.

For Obama to have crawled away from his red line, and then handed the matter over to Russia, which manifestly failed to remove chemical weapons from inside Syria, was a terrifying failure of leadership. Trump did what presidents have always done and should always need room to do: he didn’t declare war; he simply sent a sharp warning shot over an enemy’s bow, with the implicit threat that there’s much more where that came from.

I’m also willing to bet that Trump, having decided upon an objective, told the military to do it and then turned his attention to other things. In this, he would be unlike Obama, who was never even a Boy Scout, but who nevertheless felt competent to micromanage military strategy. Trump has a good eye for talent and, once that talent is on board, he delegates. That’s how leadership is supposed to work.

I was out and about earlier today, and heard two women talking about the airstrike. Actually, one woman was telling the other, who was not current on the news.

What surprised me, given that this conversation took place in Marin between two women who were quite obviously Hillary voters, is that the narrator was quite supportive of Trump. You could tell she thought he did the right thing, considering the sheer horror of the attack. However, thanks to a media that has turned on a dime from hating Putin to trusting him implicitly, she was under the impression that Trump ought to have gotten Congress’s permission first. It did not seem to occur to her that these type of warning strikes are well within the Chief Executive’s power. To drag them before Congress would make it impossible to act quickly about provocations that require immediate, but limited, attention.

In the age of Trump, we no longer have politics as usual, and thank the good Lord for that. The usual politics for the past eight years have been too damn toxic.

A handful of excellent points about wiretapping. I haven’t had much to say about the wiretapping because I’ve been too busy eating popcorn as I’ve watched the fact-free “Trump is a Putin stooge” narrative collapse, only to be replaced by a fact-filled “Obama spied on Trump, on probably on the other Republican candidates” narrative.

The only thing more fun than watching the truth come out is watching the media contortions to avoid accepting that Obama just eclipsed Watergate as the worst political scandal ever. Moreover, many of them must be grappling with the fact that they may face criminal charges for knowingly releasing to the public improperly unmasked names.

Here are a few of my favorite posts on the subject:
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