What Is The Sound Of One Clapper Yapping?

The former Director of National Intelligence, Mr. Clapper, was on CNN last night and he told the audience that it was a good thing that the FBI had a spy or spies in the Trump campaign.  In that way, Clapper confirmed (wittingly or not) that there indeed was a spy placed in the Republican presidential campaign by the Obama administration intelligence agencies.  It's a chilling thought.  It's one thing to speculate as to whether or not Obama was spying on the GOP.  It's something else entirely to have the former DNI proudly confirm that it happened and to claim it was a good thing.  It's even worse when the DNI bases that claim on something that didn't happen, namely, any Russian involvement with the Trump campaign.

In 2020, will Clapper think it a good idea if the Trump FBI spies on the campaign of Elizabeth Warren to see if there is undue influence being exerted on that campaign by the Cherokee Nation?  Will he think it a good idea if the Trump FBI surreptitiously places and agent in the campaign of Kamala Harris looking for the activities of the Chinese government?  What about looking for Iranian involvement in the Kerry campaign?  The point is that in none of these circumstances would it be a good thing to place an agent into a campaign unless there were actual proof of foreign infiltration, something that did not exist with Trump in 2016.  Political campaigns by opposition parties have to be allowed to proceed without government surveillance.  It's a basic part of what it means to be an American.  There needs to be severe and quick justice handed out to everyone involved in putting an agent into the Trump campaign.  If that means that the heads of the FBI and CIA under Obama as well as DNI Clapper have to go to jail, then let's get them there quickly.  This is the most serious threat to the political freedom of Americans that I can recall.

The Idiocy of the Professoriat

Do you remember Marc Lamont Hill?  He used to be a regular liberal guest on the old Bill O'Reilly show on Fox.  Now he comes on CNN sometimes.  He's a professor at Temple University in Philadelphia.  He's also a moron.  I say that after reading his latest article entitled "Seven Myths About the Palestinian - Israeli Conflict".  It's amazing just how dumb this piece is.

Hill (or is it Lamont-Hill?) starts with the "myth" that "these people have been fighting forever."  Here's what he says:  "This is one of the most often repeated and inaccurate comments on the conflict. The truth is that Arabs and Jews have not been fighting forever. Rather, it can be dated to the end of the 20th century or, more acutely, the beginning of the post-World War I British Mandatory period."

Amazing!  He puts the start of fighting back to the end of the 20th century.  That's just 18 years ago.  In the same sentence he also dates it to the start of the British Palestine Mandate which began 100 years ago.  So which is it?  18 years or 100 years?  Apparently, the professor doesn't know.  And if it is 100 years, isn't that tantamount to fighting forever, a proverbial 100 years war?  So what's the "myth"?  Is it that college professors know what they are talking about?

Another example:  the professor says that myth 2 is "this is a religious conflict."  According to Hill, the Palestinians include some Christians and they all used to live in peace with Jews.  (I guess that was prior to 100 years ago when the conflict started.)  Now for the reality.  Israel is the ultimate manifestation of a basic tenet of Judaism:  God gave the land of Canaan (which is now Israel) to the Jews.  It's part of every Jewish religious service.  It's really hard to say that it's not religious on the Jewish side.  Meanwhile on the Arab side, there's a major focus on the possession of Jerusalem, called the third holiest place in Islam.  And for those Christian Arabs, Jerusalem and The Holy Land are of religious importance.  Maybe the professor never heard of the Crusades.  I guess he thinks that the Crusades were just a nationalistic manifestation of the European patriarchy rather than a highly religious attempt to take back the Holy Land.  Simply put, the professor's statement that this is not a religious conflict is one of the dumbest things I've ever read.  It may be more than just a religious conflict, but it is certainly still a religious conflict.

And how about the professor's myth 6, namely "Israel has a right to exist"?  That's a myth?  Israel doesn't have a right to exist?  That's what Hill says; people have a right to exist, but countries don't.  In the period since the end of World War II, a main international narrative has been that colonialism is a bad thing and has to be ended.  Peoples of the world have a right to have their own nation states.  The Poles deserve to have Poland.  The Indians deserve to have India.  During the Vietnam War, the professor's leftist predecessors chattered incessantly about the right of the Vietnamese people to rule their own country Vietnam.  National liberation movements are based on the right of peoples to have their own country.  Well, Zionism is the national liberation movement of the Jews.  They have a right to their own country.  And remember, the idea that Israel has a right to exist is actually a counter-statement to the constant claims by Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran and many other Arab countries that Israel must be destroyed and the Jewish citizens either expelled or killed.  The professor thinks it a myth that Israel has a right to exist?  He's a moron.

I often read things on the internet which make me wonder how they were ever published.  This latest one from the professor, however, takes the cake.  It has to be the single most ignorant thing I've seen in years.

Haspell Cofirmed

It looks like the Dems lost again.  Gina Haspel was just confirmed to be Director of the CIA.  She's the first woman to lead the agency.  She's also a career employee at the CIA and an extremely well respected one at that.  She has bravely served the country for decades and done a great job.

None of that mattered to the Democrats, however.  Haspel worked at a site where three terrorists were water-boarded in the early 2000's.  That action supposedly made her a supporter of "torture" and unfit for the postion if you listen to people like Chuck Schumer and other senate Democrats.  It's actually rather strange.  The last CIA Director under Obama, John Brennan, was high up in the agency when the water-boarding was done.  He helped design that program to extract information from the terrorists.  When Obama nominated him to lead the CIA, however, none of the Democrats who vigorously opposed Haspel this year said anything about Brennan's direct involvement in setting up that program.  Instead, they waited until now and used the argument against a woman who wasn't even there when the water-boarding first began, and who did not have the authority to stop it.

It's called hypocrisy, and Chuck Schumer and his friends are the ultimate hypocrites.

Haspel deserves our congratulations.  Schumer and the Senate Democrats, however, can also have a cheer, a Bronx cheer that is.

And Now, Direct From Mbandaka.....

I keep hearing about Americans who are going to Africa as tourists.  It's the new hot place to visit, or so I am told.  And then I hear the news from the city of Mbandaka.  For those of you who are not up on your geography, Mbandaka is a city of just about 1 million people in central Africa in the Democratic Republic of Congo.  And for those of you who are not up on your news, Mbandaka is also the site of the first cases in years of the Ebola virus in Africa in an urban setting.  When Ebola outbreaks occur in the villages in the countryside, they are easier to contain.  Ebola is spread by direct contact with fluids containing the virus.  In a village, the number of people exposed to the virus is much easier to control.  Once the virus gets into a city, it is particularly hard to keep those affected isolated from others.  That makes the cases just found in Mbandaka a very dangerous thing indeed.

The Republic of Congo is supposedly "deciding" whether or not to declare this an emergency.  It's not a very hard decision to make.  If the Ebola spreads to more than a few households in the city, it could grow to hit thousands or even tens of thousands of victims.  A pandemic of this sort could leak to mass death.  So let me clue in the government of the Congo:  IT"S AN EMERGENCY!!!!!

The USA needs to help contain this outbreak just as we did when Ebola hit the nations on the West African coast a few years ago.  Oh, and if you're planning on going to Africa as a tourist, you might want to postpone that visit until the situation clears.

This Is Going To Bite Them In The Behind

Yesterday, President Trump was meeting with a group when one the people asked him about the MS-13 gang and what could be done to deal with them.  Trump responded by denouncing the gang as the monsters that they are.  He said of MS-13 that "these are not people, they are animals."

Right after Trump made that statement, the media rushed to report it as Trump denouncing all immigrants as less than human, just animals.  The AP tweeted this out.  Other media ran with the story "reported" by the AP.  Then the politicians jumped into the fray.  Chuck Schumer said that Trump had forgotten that we are all immigrants.  Calling current illegals "animals" was like saying that about our great-grandparents, according to Schumer.  Nancy Pelosi told a press conference that calling people "animals" denied the "spark of divinity" in each person and was reprehensible.  None of the media or politicians, however, mentioned that President Trump was talking about the MS-13 gang which has been killing people and committing other crimes across the country.

I think that this is going to bite the Dems in the behind.  Picture an ad in which the MS-13 gang and its crimes are described.  Then Trump denounces MS-13 by name as "animals".  Then you run video of Pelosi stating that Trump calling these people animals is reprehensible.  At that point, the announcer says, "Do you want the nation run by people like the President who think that criminal gang members are animals who must be stopped or by Democrats in Congress like Nancy Pelosi who want to defend these criminal gang members from deportation?"  Next:  "I'm _____________ and I approved this message because in Congress, I will support the deportation of criminal gang members here illegally and will fight the efforts by the Democrats like Pelosi to keep these thugs here."

So Where's The Outrage?

Let me ask you a question.  Suppose that you learn that in preparation for the November election, the Trump administration embeds informants in the senate campaigns of five senate candidates:  Claire McCaskill of Missouri, Joe Donnelly of Indiana, Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota, John Tester of Montana and Joe Manchin or West Virginia.  In addition to the informants being put in place, the FBI issues national security letters which the FBI then uses to tap the phones and read the email from those senators and their campaign staffs.  The information that these informants and wiretaps produce all gets sent back to the White House.  How do you think the media or the Democrats would react?

That's right, how would the media or the Democrats react if they learned that the Trump administration was planting informants and wiretapping five Democrat senators up for re-election in November?  The answer is simple.  The media would go into non-stop coverage of the news.  The Democrats would announce that there is a grave threat to freedom in the USA.  There would be constant comparisons to Watergate.  There would also be calls for indictments and impeachment of the President.  This all goes without saying.

But this is what was done to Donald Trump and his campaign under president Obama.  We now know that the FBI planted at least one informant and probably more inside the Trump campaign in 2016.  We also know that the FBI used national security letters to get the email and phone conversations of various members of the Trump campaign.  We also know that these actions were taken without there being any evidence of any crime having been committed by the Trump campaign and its members.

And what is the media/Democrat reaction to this news?  A yawn.  That's right, just a yawn.  The New York Times acts as if this criminal action by the Obama FBI, Justice Department and White House is perfectly normal.  It's not.

We now know that in 2016, the DNC and the Clinton campaign spent $13 million to have a phony dossier written to accuse President Trump of all manner of sleazy and criminal actions.  Then they had the dossier distributed to the media and they even got John McCain and others to give it to the FBI.  Meanwhile, the Obama White House had the FBI implant informants into the Trump campaign to spy on it from the inside.  There were also national security letters issued so that the FBI could wiretap and read the email of those in the campaign.  Don't be misled, a national security letter is something the FBI itself can issue.  It does not take a court order.  As for court orders, we also know that the Obama FBI and DOJ then used the bogus dossier illegally to get a FISA warrant from the FISA court.  An application for a FISA warrant is required by law only to contain information that has been verified as true by the FBI.  That didn't happen; instead, the FBI and DOJ submitted the dossier that they knew to be unverified (and phony) and they kept that info from the court.  They also didn't tell the court that the dossier had been paid for by the DNC and Hillary Clinton.  In short, we now know that in 2016, the Democrats and President Obama used the national security apparatus of the USA to try to undermine and destroy the Republican candidate for president.  That is a crime of major proportions.  It is a crime for which people should go to prison.  Indeed, it is proof that the Democrats are incredibly corrupt and have no regard for the law.  America should be outraged.

Unbelievable -- the Leak Of Michael Cohen's Financial Records

Not long ago, certain confidential financial records of Michael Cohen were leaked to the media.  It was a really terrible sort of leak.  These are private records of a private citizen that the government got through legal process which requires confidentiality be maintained.  The Treasury Department Inspector General began an investigation to determine who the leaker is and how the leak happened.  Now, according to the New Yorker, the leaker has spoken with that magazine and given his reasons for the leak, and they are really both amazing and awful at the same time.  Here's how the New Yorker puts it:
That source, a law-enforcement official, is speaking publicly for the first time, to The New Yorker, to explain the motivation: the official had grown alarmed after being unable to find two important reports on Cohen’s financial activity in a government database. The official, worried that the information was being withheld from law enforcement, released the remaining documents.

You need a bit of background to understand what this leaker has told the New Yorker.

1.  The leaker says that the information was being withheld from law enforcement.  Think about that for a moment.  The leaker is "a law-enforcement official" who had the records already.  That really undercuts the idea that the information was being withheld from law enforcement.  It's roughly the equivalent of President Trump leaking something to the press on the grounds that the information was being withheld from the White House.  It's ridiculous on its face.

2.  The leaker couldn't find the documents in a particular government data base used by law enforcement.  The leaker, however, does not know why that was so.  It's possible that access to the documents was restricted to a particular group of investigators who were working on the Cohen case.  It's also possible that the entry of documents into the data base was not yet complete.  It's also possible that the documents were actually in the data base but filed under a different designation than the one for which the leaker searched.  Under no explanation, however, is it possible that the bank involved or Michael Cohen did not turn over the records to the government under a promise (and legal obligation) of confidentiality.  The leaker's supposed complaint has to do with how the investigators filed the documents once received.  In short, the leaker's own story is that he broke the law, violated an individual's privacy rights and potentially undermined any prosecution of Michael Cohen in the future because he didn't like the government's filing system.  That's moronic.

I don't know who the leaker is.  When his or her identity is determined, however, the leaker should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.  It's the wages of stupidity.