Bookworm Room

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

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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Administrative state turns into Fifth Column in Trump presidency

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Fifth ColumnGovernment employees, worried about job security, have turned into a Fifth Column willing to destroy the government rather than risk a drained swamp. I probably should define my term before I go on, as “Fifth Column” is not as common a phrase as it once was. It’s origin goes back to the Spanish Civil War. General Emilio Mola, who fought for Franco’s Nationalist party, assured a journalist in 1936 that he had military superiority as he approached Madrid, not just because of the four columns of troops he commanded in the field, but because he had a “fifth column” (i.e., Quinta columna) of Nationalist supporters inside Madrid who would work to undermine the government from within.

Mola’s definition of his Fifth Column perfectly defines what we’re seeing play out America’s Progressives, with active help from the Obama administration and post-presidency organizations he established, work from within the government to destroy the Trump presidency. I’ve assembled a sizable collection of articles on the topic and will share with you the money quotes from each.

Adam Kredo might have been the first one to get the information showing that the dots, when connected, point not to Flynn but to the Deep State:

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Bookworm Beat 1/26/17 – Life in Trump’s America round-up

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President Trump's America oath of officeYou’ll notice that the title of this post — Life in Trump’s America — echoes previous round-ups I did called Life in Obama’s America. Those old posts were dystopian; in this, the new Age of Trump, things are a lot more cheerful when viewed through the prism of patriotism, rationality, and fealty to the Constitution. Yeah, the Left is going batsh*t crazy, but that’s proof that Trump, in his first seven days in office, has been doing just about everything right. Don’t believe me? Just check out these links:

Opening with a little deserved snark about the idiocy underlying the much vaunted Women’s march. Col. Richard Kemp, if you’ve forgotten is the retired British military officer who loudly explained over all the mewling antisemitism from Europe and the UN, that he’d never seen a military put itself at such great risk to protect enemy civilians as Israel’s military. He’s now weighed in rather brilliantly on the stupidity behind that women’s “empowerment” march:

What?! You haven’t met Big Joe yet? You must. Big Joe found himself accidentally in the midst of one of the women’s marches and he had a lot to say on the subject, all of it delightful:

Vagina-less females suffering discrimination. This is old news by at least five days, but I’ll throw it in anyway for those who might have missed it. Pro-Life women weren’t the only ones left out of the Women’s March last Saturday. Women without vaginas also suffered discrimination, what will all those pink knit caps and the ladies dressed up as lady parts. Oh, in case you’re wondering what a woman without a vagina is . . . well, in the old days, we would call that person a man. Nowadays, it’s someone who, rejecting biological reality, has picked “women” as his chosen identity.

There is something truly delightful about watching the Left eat its own.

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In Ankara, ISIS is clearly behind Ambassador Karlov’s assassination *UPDATED*

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Is there any question that, when Mevlüt Mert Altıntaş killed Andrei Karlov in cold blood, he was doing so either at ISIS’s behest or as part of a lone wolf ISIS-inspired assassination? To me, this picture provides the only evidence one needs:

ISIS gesture Mevlüt Mert Altıntaş assassination Ambassador Karlov

We’ve seen that gesture before:

The Islamic State militants, known as ISIS, are now using a single, raised index finger as the symbol of their cause. It’s a well-known sign of power and victory around the world, but for ISIS, it has a more sinister meaning.

Nathaniel Zelinsky writes in Foreign Affairs that the gesture refers to the tawhid, “the belief in the oneness of God and a key component of the Muslim religion.” More specifically, though, it refers to their fundamentalist interpretation of the tawhid, which rejects any other view, including other Islamic interpretations, as idolatry. Zelinsky writes that when ISIS uses the gesture, it is affirming an ideology that demands the destruction of the West, as well as any form of pluralism. For potential recruits around the globe, it also shows their belief that they will dominate the world.

Here are some examples:

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Bookworm Beat 12/16/16 — the random politics edition

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Change the politicsThanks to my friends, I have an email box filled with links to fascinating, random politics. In keeping with that random spirit, I present to you this randomly organized post:

Principled journalism versus American journalism. Conservatives have been understandably charmed by the meltdown that Kurt Eichenwald, a Newsweak reporter suffered, first on Tucker Carlson’s show and then again after Carlson’s show in a series of tweets. Eichenwald scurried around like a maddened trapped rat, trying desperately to avoid Carlson’s direct question about Eichenwald’s unfounded, slanderous tweet claiming Trump checked into a mental hospital. Eichenwald ended the embarrassing debacle by blaming a tweet with a flashing GIF for his having a seizure and then announcing that he was taking time off from work on that account.

Eichenwald could have handled the whole thing differently. He could have followed this Spanish reporter who, upon learning that he’d relied on a poor source and made a false statement, took full responsibility for his failure and then voluntarily quit his job. In America, being a member of the mainstream media means that no apology is expected, unless it’s a non-apology apology, after which you get a better job or get your fake news turned into a movie.

Obama and that Russian hack. Okay, first off, I don’t believe in any Russian hack. I mean, we know that Russia and a lot of other nations spend a great deal of time probing America’s cyber weaknesses. The reality here, though, is that Russia did not mess with voting machines, or state or federal databases.

What someone did (either Russia or, more likely, an angry Bernie supporter) was send a phishing email to John Podesta, who took the bait and exposed his and the DNC’s actual emails to the eyes of the world. What the world saw was ugly. It wasn’t fake. It was the real Democrats being stupid, racist, and manipulative.

When it comes to real Russian hacking (the probing into state secrets, etc.), Obama has done nothing in eight years either to strengthen our cyber weaknesses or, for that matter, to harden America’s electric grid against an EMP attack. He’s done nothing at all but bring down America’s economy, America’s national security, and America’s standing in the world. John Podhortez has knocked one out of the park with this description of an Obama utterly passive in the face of every foreign threat or initiative.

stupid-leftists-hacking-russians-and-donna-brazile

Lately, the only thing that seems to induce some sort of activity in Obama is trying to make life more difficult for Trump by filling administrative positions that, traditionally, are left for the incoming president to fill. Perhaps Obama isn’t aware that Trump has no problem saying “You’re fired.”

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Russian hacking, if it happened, is inconsequential

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6888994373_2056e509f5_voting-boothHalf my Facebook feed is hysterical about alleged Russian hacking. However, now that I’ve had some time to think about it, I’ve concluded that, if it happened, it’s completely inconsequential.

Before I get to the allegations, let me start with the possible ways in which Russia could have interfered with the election:

1. It could have handed money over to anti-Hillary groups to help power their opposition to her campaign. This is what Obama did, when he handed taxpayer money over to a variety of groups in Israel that worked hard to destroy Netanyahu’s candidacy. He also interfered with Britain’s election when he made trade threats regarding Brexit. Progressives are okay with interfering with another nation’s election, provided that Obama does it. [UPDATE: A friend reminded me that Obama probably took in massive amounts in foreign donations in 2008 and 2012 because he turned off credit card safeguards.]

2. It could have hacked into computer voting machines, although it would have had to deal with the fact that each state has its own system, ranging from paper votes, to scanning machines, to fully computerized voting machines.

3. It could have spread misinformation — that is, it could have spread absolute lies.

These lies might have included stories about the fact that Hillary’s husband frequently hung out with a convicted pedophile and flew on the pedophile’s private jet to the pedophile’s private island abounding with young, very young, women. Oh, wait. Never mind. That really happened.

Russia could have said that Hillary is so abusive that she’s completely loathed by those people whose job required them to lay down their lives for her. Ah! That’s not a lie either.

Wait! I got it. Russia could have spread a lie intended to humiliate Hillary by saying that she bravely landed under sniper fire in Bosnia, only to have the truth emerge that she was greeted at the tarmac by a little girl with flowers. Sorry, sorry! The story about the sniper fire in Bosnia is indeed a lie, but Hillary spread it about herself.

My point is why would the Russians lie when the Democrat party and its candidate already have that task under control?

4. It could have requested that DNC staffers send it their passwords and, armed with that information, hacked into the DNC email server and published the Democrats’ own emails, without any amendments, spoliation, fake inserts, or other manipulation of data. In other words, it could have humiliated Democrats by exposing them for the weird, hate-filled, incompetent, racist, people they are, people who unblinkingly destroyed the people’s favored candidate (Bernie) in order to elevate a woman they agreed was incompetent and not too bright, as well as not very likely to win on the merits.

With those four types of hacking in mind, the question for you, before we get into actual facts, is which type of “hacking” should get people’s hackles up? I would say that Types 1, 2, and 3 are problematic.

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The unintentionally funny anguish of the distraught feminist Hillary voter *UPDATED*

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Weeping Woman 1937 by Pablo Picasso 1881-1973I want to share with you one of the funniest feminist posts I’ve ever read, although the humor this anguished feminist infuses in her post is entirely accidental. The whole thing reminds me of nothing so much as the Oscar Wilde’s quotation about The Old Curiosity Shop: “One must have a heart of stone to read the death of little Nell without laughing.”

Unlike Dickens, the post to which I refer is not literature but — Oh. My. God. — it did make me laugh. Self-described “comedy writer” Eirene Donohoe confesses through a veil of tears that she is still unable to recover from Hillary’s loss. If she’s a comedy writer, this post is the tears of a clown.

The post opens with Donohoe describing her valiant efforts to live her life as if nothing has changed since that fatal day in November. Then, overcome by emotion, Donohoe finally admits that she can no longer pretend that life is still normal or, indeed, that her life or the lives of any women in America still matter:

I’m a comedy writer, but suddenly I was thinking up stories about post-apocalyptic worlds where women revolt and take over the planet. I started thinking about writing a song. Something that captured everything I was feeling. A love song, a fight song. Something to show the world that I was still with Her.

I am her. The words flashed through my head. And suddenly, there on the 101 freeway, I was down the hole again. Tears streaming, sobs choking, heart breaking. The realization hitting me. I am Her.

Yes, this young comedy writer in Los Angeles, with her three-year-old child, is identical to a 69-year-old woman who has built an entire career based upon her willingness to stand by her husband, a man repeatedly and credibly accused of raping and otherwise sexually assaulting women. Moreover, Donohoe’s woes aside, if one looks back over Hillary’s career, one can see that, up until her tenure as Secretary of State, she accomplished nothing other than being her husband’s wife — and, moreover, a wife who strongly felt he and the rest of the Democrat party owed her for her unswerving fealty to covering up his (and her) financial and sexual peccadilloes.

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The Recount and Other Crazy Progressive Ideas About the Election

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hanging_chad_thumb1When my mother died, I inherited a family friend who is very old, very lonely, and quite sweet. He is also a hard-core, unrepentant Leftist, who found the election shattering and is placing all his faith in the recount. Rather than picking a fight with a frail nonagenarian, I suggested that, as we can’t change what’s happening, we may as well sit back and enjoy the show. This round-up is about the marvelous spectacle of Leftist meltdown, which sees them swinging wildly between recount euphoria, anger and recriminations, and pink-hatted foolishness.

Is Hillary painting a target on her back? Many conservatives, myself included, were chagrined when Donald Trump intimated that he was willing to let Hillary’s illegalities go in the spirit of moving on from the election. As far as I could tell, the Progressives would spit on this gesture — as they would on anything from Trump — rather than seeing it as a peace offering.  Also, to the extent it’s manifest that Hillary committed real crimes, any investigation and indictment would not be about politics but about ensuring that the rule of law still means something in America. Nevertheless, Trump tried for the olive branch . . .

. . . And Hillary seems to be doing her darndest to ensure that she really does spend her last years in a jail cell. At least that’s what Roger L. Simon thinks:

Hillary has everything to lose.  I mean everything. And almost nothing to gain, considering the nearly insurmountable odds of the election being overturned. Three states are in play with voting differentials ranging from just over ten thousand to over seventy thousand.  She would have to win all three.  Al Gore couldn’t win one when the differential was a measly 572 votes.

[snip]

But, astoundingly, after receiving what many are calling a “Get Out of Jail Free” card, Clinton joined forces with Stein in her crusade. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a dopier, more self-destructive example of “poking the lion,” especially since there are so many areas in which she could be liable from a mere obstruction of justice charge on to a full RICO investigation the could literally implicate dozens of members of her already-reeling political party.

Hillary has never struck me as being even half as smart as she and her followers think she is. Instead, she is the perfect combination of a mundane mind, a narrowly programmed fund of knowledge, and hubris.

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Crowd-sourcing help wanted re whether Russia manipulated the election *UPDATED*

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putinA genuinely curious Progressive asked me to address this breathless article claiming that Russia actively interfered with the American election:

In assessing Donald Trump’s presidential victory, Americans continue to look away from this election’s most alarming story: the successful effort by a hostile foreign power to manipulate public opinion before the vote.

U.S. intelligence agencies determined that the Russian government actively interfered in our elections. Russian state propaganda gave little doubt that this was done to support President-elect Trump, who repeatedly praised Vladimir Putin and excused the Russian president’s foreign aggression and domestic repression. Most significantly, U.S. intelligence agencies have affirmed that the Russian government directed the illegal hacking of private email accounts of the Democratic National Committee and prominent individuals. The emails were then released by WikiLeaks, which has benefited financially from a Russian state propaganda arm, used Russian operatives for security and made clear an intent to harm the candidacy of Hillary Clinton.

Of the top of my head, I was able to come up with several “don’t worry” arguments, but I did want to tap all of you for further arguments. Here’s what I’ve come up with:

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Are the next 26 days the last act in an American tragedy? *UPDATED*

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14597528198_1023f14876_opera-death-sceneYou know what those of us who are not opera fans really hate about opera? We hate the fact that, after the heroine has been dealt the fatal blow, it still takes her another half hour of frantic soprano singing before she dies. I suspect that the attenuated operatic death scene will be an apt metaphor for the last 27 days of America’s 2016 election cycle. Trump and his supporters are still singing as loudly and as strongly as they can, but the death-blow has already been dealt.

You see, it’s become very apparent that the American media has been sitting on information that might have affected the outcome of the Republican primaries. Had the media been genuinely interested in reporting the news and/or in ensuring that each party offered its finest candidate to the American people, the stories of Trump’s behavior towards women would have been in the news during the peak of the primary season.

The media, however, was not interested in serving America and its democracy. It was interested only in ensuring that Hillary, the most corrupt, incompetent person ever to run for president, would be facing the most vulnerable candidate possible. So, during the primaries, the media gave Trump all the airtime necessary to build him up and now it’s again giving him all the airtime necessary . . . only this time it’s releasing a steady stream of deadly poison that is the equivalent of the poison the precedes the last half hour of the soprano’s tragic, but lyrical, end.

Scott Adams, who has called the election with remarkable acuity, believes that this carefully planned coup (my phrasing, not his) means that the election is over and that Hillary wins:

If the latest groping/kissing allegations against Trump hold up – and I assume they will, based on quantity if not credibility – it won’t matter what Wikileaks says about Clinton. She will win easily.

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Hillary Clinton is all yours, ladies. She and her alleged rapist husband are your brand now. Wear them well.

The same female cohort that brought us the scandal-ridden Warren G. Harding administration is on the verge of bringing us a Hillary administration that is mired in scandal even before it begins. I am, as I often have been in the last two decades, incredibly embarrassed to share XX chromosomes with so many morons.

Charlie Kirk’s hypothesis about millennials forces one to reach much the same conclusion about them that Adams reached about women:  The young Bernie supporters who cannot get excited about Hillary have been trained like Pavlov’s dogs to get excited about accusations of men engaged in sexual misconduct. While they wouldn’t vote for Hillary, now that she fits into their hardwired victim algorithm, they will turn out in droves to punish Trump.

Two other things lead me to believe we’re in the last half-hour of an opera that ends with all the good people scattered about dead on the stage:

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The Bookworm Beat 11-18-15 — “the mother of all round-ups” edition and open thread

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Woman-writing-300x265I have been collecting links for days and will try to share them all with you. Here goes:

Only conservatives are paying attention

In an attempt to deflect attention of Muslim depredations in Paris, the Left and its foot soldiers (all of whom seem to be my Facebook friends) immediately attacked Americans and other Westerners for failing to pay attention to a bombing the day before in Lebanon (an ISIS v. Hezbollah bombing, so it was Horrible People v. Horrible People). I eventually got tired of commenting on their posts to the effect that I have been paying attention to all of these attacks, primarily because they are all different manifestations of a single radical Islamic entity, and I’ve been trying to get everyone to pay as much attention as I do.

Emma Kelly says what I was too polite to say explicitly to these Leftists: The reason you didn’t know about these other attacks isn’t because the newspapers didn’t report them, it’s because you weren’t paying attention.

I’ll add something that Kelly didn’t, though: You weren’t paying attention because American and European media outlets don’t want you to see that Islam is a problem, so they report on these incidents, but downplay them. Meanwhile you get loud noise about Ben Carson’s alleged lies, Hillary’s brilliance, Republicans’ meanness, Donald Trump’s hair, and Kim Kardashian’s pregnancy.

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