D-Day, T-Day, the Coup, and the Deep State

Here’s a big post offering a celebration of toxic masculinity, D-Day squared; two anti-Trump coup updates; and the deep state’s entanglement with the media.

D-DayD-Day & Toxic Masculinity:

Today is June 6.  Today we celebrate toxic masculinity — twice.

One thing we celebrate today is the 75th anniversary of American, British, and Canadian forces conducting a seaborne and airborne attack into Normandy to establish a foothold on the continent of Europe during WWII.  To the men, icons of Toxic Masculinity one and all, who took part, we salute you for your bravery and sacrifice. Some worthwhile links:

USA Today: D-Day: 17 stunning photos from 1944 show how hard the Normandy invasion really was

U.S. Army:  D-Day, June 6, 1944

Youtube:  Normandy — Surviving D-Day

National Geographic: ‘Top Secret’ maps reveal the massive Allied effort behind D-Day

BBC: D-Day: 10 things you might not know about the Normandy invasion

Then there is, of course, the alternative D-Day, also a celebration on June 6 of toxic masculinity (and other bits)  . . . first celebrated by Ms. Bookworm in 2015.

Coup Update

Democrat and deep state efforts to overturn the 2016 election continue apace. Two things in the news today as regards the effort.  One is the complaint by people targeted in the Mueller investigation at the incredibly heavy-handed tactics Mueller used in an attempt to have them implicate Trump.  This from RCI:

Now that Mueller has ended his probe finding no election collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, 10 witnesses and targets of his sprawling, $35 million investigation agreed to speak with RealClearInvestigations because they are no longer in legal jeopardy. . . .

Their firsthand accounts pull back the curtain on the secret inner workings of the Mueller probe, revealing how the special counsel’s nearly two dozen prosecutors and 40 FBI agents used harshly aggressive tactics to pressure individuals to either cop to crimes or implicate others in felonies involving collusion.

Although they interacted with Mueller’s team at different times and in different places, the witnesses and targets often echoed each other. Almost all decried what they called Mueller’s “scorched earth” methods that affected their physical, mental and financial health. Most said they were forced to retain high-priced Washington lawyers to protect them from falling into “perjury traps” for alleged lying, which became the special counsel’s charge of last resort.  In the end, Mueller convicted four Trump associates for this so-called process crime, and investigated an additional five individuals for allegedly making false statements – including former Attorney General Jeff Sessions. . . .

Mueller, who studiously ignored the roles of Clinton and Obama in the Russia investigation and its origins, didn’t fail to indict Trump for lack of trying.  Indeed, given the arm twisting and expense innocent citizens were put through by Mueller, I am surprised some did not lie about Trump to save their skin. It speaks well of those associated with Trump that they did not.

Having spied on the Trump 2016 election campaign and initiated a (likely unlawful) thorough criminal investigation of Trump that would have made the Soviet Union’s Lavrentiy Beria (“Show me the man, I’ll show you the crime”) proud, the Left is now intent on overturning the election on the claim of a process crime — that Trump obstructed an investigation of himself for a crime that he didn’t commit. Leaving aside the law (18 U.S. Code § 1512(c)) and the fact that nothing Trump did rises to a level of actionable obstruction under that law, the Dems and deep state are hitting a bit of a snag, as it does not seem the Senate will cooperate with impeachment. Oooh, big problem, that.

Enter progressive “constitutional scholar” Lawrence Tribe — a true exemplar of Harvard’s finest — with an opinion piece in Wapo today, “Impeach Trump. But don’t necessarily try him in the Senate.”  Crazy Larry has been advocating impeachment of Trump since shortly after Trump was elected in 2016 on a number of constantly changing justifications.  Interestingly enough, one of Tribe’s later justifications for impeachment was Trump’s claim “that Obama had his ‘wires tapped’ in Trump Tower.”

When law professor Johnathan Turley laughed off the idea on Morning Joe, back in March, Tribe had a mini-conniption on Twitter: “Using power of WH to falsely accuse [Obama of an] impeachable felony does qualify as an impeachable offense whether via tweet or not,” he huffed.

“Falsely accuse”, eh?  Irony is the meat and potatoes of the finest schadenfreude, though it almost never registers with proggies.

At any rate, Tribe is clear that he wants to see Trump impeached.  But impeachment in the House, with nothing else, will have no impact on Trump and Trump’s chances for reelection in 2020 — except to possibly enhance them.  Thus Tribe argues that the House should go beyond simply voting on impeachment and hold full-scale impeachment hearings in the House proper:

It seems fair to surmise, then, that an impeachment inquiry conducted with ample opportunity for the accused to defend himself before a vote by the full House would be at least substantially protected, even if not entirely bullet-proofed, against a Senate whitewash.

The House, assuming an impeachment inquiry leads to a conclusion of Trump’s guilt, could choose between presenting articles of impeachment even to a Senate pre-committed to burying them and dispensing with impeachment as such while embodying its conclusions of criminality or other grave wrongdoing in a condemnatory “Sense of the House” resolution far stronger than a mere censure. The resolution, expressly and formally proclaiming the president impeachable but declining to play the Senate’s corrupt game, is one that even a president accustomed to treating everything as a victory would be hard-pressed to characterize as a vindication. (A House resolution finding the president “impeachable” but imposing no actual legal penalty would avoid the Constitution’s ban on Bills of Attainder, despite its deliberately stigmatizing character as a “Scarlet ‘I’ ” that Trump would have to take with him into his reelection campaign.)

The point would not be to take old-school House impeachment leading to possible Senate removal off the table at the outset. Instead, the idea would be to build into the very design of this particular inquiry an offramp that would make bypassing the Senate an option while also nourishing the hope that a public fully educated about what this president did would make even a Senate beholden to this president and manifestly lacking in political courage willing to bite the bullet and remove him. . . .

Only there’s a problem with that, one that a “constitutional scholar” really ought to be able to spot, even if he is a proggie.  While Article One Section II of the Constitution provides that the House of Representatives “shall have the sole power of impeachment,” Section III provides that the Senate “shall have the sole power to try all impeachments.”  Ahhh, but the damn Constitution gets in the way of the best laid proggie plans yet again.  Maybe that’s why Crazy Larry never quotes the Constitution in his article.

If we do not have a civil war with blood in the streets in this country during my lifetime because progressives run roughshod over the Constitution, I will be amazed.

Lee Smith on Deep State & the Media

Everything journalist Lee Smith at Tablet writes is worth the read.  His latest, out today, is Spies are the New Journalists, decrying the relationship that has developed between the press and the intelligence agencies, one that is at the heart of the “deep state.”  As Smith writes, our nation is now one “where spies are . . . in charge of shaping the news, with the goal of advancing their own institutional agendas, prosecuting political hits, and keeping themselves and their political patrons beyond the reach of the laws that apply to everyone else.”  No kidding.  Step one to ending this is finding out who the multiple leakers were at the start of the Trump administration.  Does anyone doubt that it will likely be one or more of the top people at DOJ, FBI and or CIA?

Do read the whole thing.  Then celebrate the D-Day(s) appropriately.


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