The Bookworm Beat 3/13/17 — beware the Deep State edition
Progressives deny the Deep State, even as they boast about its accomplishments. So who’s really delusional when talking about the Deep State?
Progressives call conservatives delusional for worrying about a Deep State, while at the same time boasting about the Deep State’s accomplishments. While fealty to Left-wing ideas is a Progressive virtue, no one can ever accuse them of being loyal to facts and logic. This post aims to adduce a few fact points showing that there’s nothing “fake” about the conservative concern that the administrative branch of government, like Frankenstein’s monster, is alive and willing to kill to protect itself — and that Obama is the man leading this army of baby Frankenstein’s monsters.
Obama is the anti-President. Being the anti-President isn’t as bad as being the anti-Christ, but it’s not good. Indeed, it’s an awful, constitutional inversion of a democratic republic. Daniel Greenfield, who has a knack for summarizing complex data points, lays out the indictment against Obama. You need to read it in its entirety, but here’s a small taste to whet your appetite:
Obama Inc. had targeted Trump from the very beginning when it was clear he would be the nominee.
Trump had locked down the GOP nomination in May. Next month there was a FISA request targeting him. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court denied the request, and it is still unknown whether the request targeted Trump, or only his associates, but it’s silly to pretend that the submission of such a request a month after he became the presumptive GOP nominee was apolitical.
The second, narrower, FISA request came through in October. This one was approved. The reason for getting a FISA request in October was even more obvious than June. October is the crucial month in presidential elections. It’s the month of the “October Surprise” when the worst hit pieces based on the keenest opposition research is unleashed. Obama’s opposition research on Trump involved eavesdropping on a server in Trump Tower. Nixon would have been very jealous.
[snip]
Obama Anonymous conducted its coup in layers. The first layer partnered congressional Democrats with OA personnel to retain control of as much of the government as possible by the Obama Deep State. They did it by blocking Trump’s nominees with endless hearings and protests. The second layer partnered congressional Democrats with the deeper layer of Obama operatives embedded in law enforcement and intelligence agencies who were continuing the Obama investigations of Trump.
This second layer sought to use the investigation to force out Trump people who threatened their control over national security, law enforcement and intelligence. It is no coincidence that their targets, Flynn and Sessions, were in that arena. Or that their views on Islamic terror and immigration are outside the consensus making them easy targets for Obama Anonymous and its darker allies.
Read the whole thing here. It will help you understand the very dangerous situation in which Obama is placing the nation. In the old days, the opposition usually just staked out its position and argued it vociferously. This is the first time that I know of in which the outgoing president has created a shadow government by which he still seeks to exercise power.
Obama is like the dead body that keeps popping up. David Solway riffed off of Daniel Greenfield to liken Obama to the dead body in Hitchcock’s cult movie, The Trouble With Harry — no matter how hard you try to get rid of him, he just keeps popping up again:
The trouble with Barry, like Hitchcock’s moribund Harry, is that he never seems to go away, constantly emerging at the most inopportune moments. Unlike every other president in American history, Obama has dedicated himself to the practice of what the Washington Examiner has described as “post-presidential meddling.”
He has thrown himself fully into Alinsky-style “community organizing,” stirring up resistance to the Trump administration in every way conceivable: installing, according to the New York Post, a “shadow government,” dubbed Organizing for Action, comprising more than 30,000 agitators and 250 chapters across the U.S., in order “to sabotage the incoming administration”; renting a dwelling and setting up command headquarters around the corner from the White House; cooking up the Russian hacking fable; and most recently, allegedly wiretapping Trump Tower, which seems disturbingly probable following the salient remarks of Ret. Army Intelligence Officer Tony Shaffer on Fox and the revelations from Breitbart News. Mark Levin’s accusation that Obama is orchestrating a “silent coup” against Trump rings true. As Daniel Greenfield points out:
There is now a President and an Anti-President. A government and a shadow government. The anti-President controls more of the government through his shadow government than the real President.
Obama and his Deep State have engaged in “a criminal conspiracy of unprecedented scope.”
A few other writers are connecting the dots about Obama’s Deep State coup. If you want a lot of “connect the dots” evidence showing that the Obama administration was spying on Trump, that the media knew what was going on, and that Obama probably did too, check out A.J. Strata’s careful analysis of publicly available information.
Melanie Phillips focuses on the Obama team’s careful “non-denial denials” and concludes that they’re essentially admitting to the things of which they stand accused.
Also, if Democrats define a lack of logic, Charlie Martin is the very definition of logic — and when you get him applying logic to the facts the MSM has been feeding us for months, you end up with a narrative that supports Trump’s tweeted accusations, not the Obama non-denials.
The FBI is becoming Exhibit A in the deep state narrative. Beginning last year, FBI Director Comey started doing strange things: He publicly indicted Hillary by laying out damning facts against her related to her blatant and dangerous disregard for national security and then announced that it was all no biggie and that he wouldn’t even pass it on to the U.S. Attorney. He then announced again that he was having the FBI investigate Hillary, only to finish with a Gilda Radner-esque “Never mind.” And now it turns out that he used American taxpayer money to pay for opposition research that Hillary Clinton commissioned during her 2016 campaign.
It’s two media’s in one. During the Obama years, the media was all purring complacency, breathlessly retelling each statement from the White House and its various administrative agencies as if these statements came directly from Mt. Sinai.
During the Trump weeks, we have evidence that, if Trump were to announce that “it’s cold in here,” every major news outlet would come together to explain that, when Trump made this statement, it was only 68 degrees Fahrenheit and that only sociopaths would attempt to convince an unwitting public that this is a cold temperature — never mind that, during the Obama years, the same outlets cooed about the fact that the Hawaiian-born Obama (who spent most of his life in Chicago), kept the Oval Office at a toasty 75 degrees, courtesy of the taxpayers footing the bill for White House energy consumption.
I mention this as a prelude to Stephen Knotts’ fun-fact-filled article detailing how academia, which graduates the students who fill the media’s ranks, goes easy on Democrats (they’re always good, always pure, always smart) and not so easy on Republicans (evil, stupid, greedy, violent).