You’re Fired!

President Donald Trump fired the acting attorney general, Sally Q. Yates, after she refused to perform her duty to defend the legality of his temporary ban on immigrants from terrorist-spawning countries. The purpose of Mr. Trump’s executive order was to help protect Americans from terrorist attacks. Trump has said existing vetting procedures were flimsy and inadequate, and he wants to see strict vetting procedures in place before he lifts the ban.

Ms. Yates’s grandstanding for the media exacerbated her failure to do her job. Mr. Trump had elevated her to acting attorney general pending the drawn out confirmation of Jeff Sessions as attorney general. Instead of turning down Mr. Trump’s offer privately and civilly, she chose to accept his offer, then air out her disagreement with him on immigration policy publicly.

The Declaration states the People may institute a government built on the principles and forms of power “most likely to effect their safety and happiness.” The Constitution echoes and builds on that when it says its purpose is “to form a more Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity… .”

Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution grants the president “the executive Power”. Section 2 names him the Commander-in-Chief. Section 3 makes it the president’s duty to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed”.

The president not only has the authority to see our duly enacted immigration laws executed, he has the duty to do so. Nothing in the immigration law and the president’s execution of it violates statutory or constitutional law. If a ban on immigration from violent or ideologically violent countries in the world obtains the defense, safety, and tranquility of the American people, then it is lawful.

When Ms. Yates complained she could not defend Mr. Trump’s ban, she had to defend her warrantless position by asserting she had “to do the right thing.” It’s an irony, because so many people have argued for the severance of law from morality. While I would agree that morality must be weighed when reflecting on law and policy in regard to fundamental questions, prudence and pragmatism play their roles in others.

Do citizens and foreigners own the same privileges, rights, and responsibilities under American law? No. That would be absurd. The government was instituted of the people, by the people, for the people, the people being the citizens. The only way for a foreigner to appropriate the rights, privileges, and responsibilities under American law is to become American, and that means rejecting what he or she was and his or her allegiances. It means accepting what an American is and what our way is as a body politic and as a culture.

Finally, let’s deal with the claim that we cannot ban Muslims from entering the country. The proponents of this position cite two reasons: first, it constitutes a religious test; second, it will inflame terrorist passions and make them terrorize more.

The answer to the first reason is a ban on Muslim entry into our country isn’t based on most of what Islam is but is based on one of its ideologies or tenets: that it is holy and just to kill people who reject Islam or Mohamed. That belief is not merely un-American, it is anti-American. It violates our law. It assaults our Constitution. It transgresses our culture and our reason. The laws of God, of Nature, of man, of our Constitution do not permit murder on religious grounds. Thanks to both our Rationalist and Christian perspective, we reject utterly any such principle. Similarly, we reject those people who bear such a perspective from entering our country and plying their bloody beliefs here.

We are absolutely under no obligation – moral, legal, constitutional, etc – to permit such individuals to enter our country. If the safeguards for preventing the entry of such individuals are defective or deficient, our president has a duty to ban such folks, even en masse, from entering our country and endangering our safety.

Ms. Yates doesn’t understand that simple, legally correct position. Addled by a foreigners first mentality, and having abandoned and lost sight of the people whom she swore to protect, Ms. Yates elevated her personal feelings to the pinnacle of consideration.

As citizens, the members of the Justice Department have the right to agree or disagree with this person or the other and this policy or that policy. They may express their agreement or disagreement among private friends or at the ballot box.

As members of the federal Justice Department, however, every attorney maintains an obligation and responsibility to do his job. They are not advocating for themselves or for a particular political persuasion, they are advocating for the people through the executive branch of the government. The lawyers in the attorney general’s office were not elected by the people; the president was. If for some particular matter the conscience of a member of the Justice Department has become so strained he cannot follow the directives of his chief executive, then he should do the honest and honorable thing and quietly resign.

Yates was warped. She was so warped that she could neither fulfill her duty nor act honorably. She chose to make a scene. The president acted swiftly and decisively: Mr. Trump fired her.

The second complaint, growled and whined by the likes of senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham, states that in appearing to single out Islam or Muslims, Mr. Trump inflames their hatred and determination to commit more terrorism, serves as a recruiting tool, and because of those two points, will make Americans more unsafe and ultimately lose the war against terrorism.

One of many good ways to dissolve this line of thinking is to use the analogy of the man who says he loves his wife, so he stalks her and beats her for every real or imagined offense while he lives exactly the way he wants to live. She has to be “made” to love him. He does not really love her as a woman; he loves her as a thing to own and do with as he pleases. His real goal is domination, not love.

The wife develops a mentality that if she can just please him in everything, he will stop beating her. It’s her fault he loses control. She isn’t doing enough. Of course, she never will. And he’ll keep slapping and punching and kicking her, because that is who he is.

It’s the same thing for the Muslim who takes the errors of the Koran to heart. The infidel must be threatened, tortured, killed, or at least extorted for money. The infidels keep thinking it’s their fault. They aren’t diverse enough, they aren’t multicultural enough, they are too trapped in their own biases and prejudices, so they don’t want to make the Muslim mad, because he’ll just threaten, torture, and kill more. The reality is the Muslim will never admit to his own evil and his own problem, the propensity for the Mohamed-sanctioned inhuman violence which is the only commodity with which he trades. Convert or die. Be like me, or die.

The superficial way Mr. McCain and Mr. Graham approach Muslim terror will never solve the problem, which perhaps is not solvable anyway as long as human beings are sinners. The only way to obtain and to keep the upper hand, however, is a mix of force and construction. The United States must meet the violence directed at its citizens with the force necessary to defeat that violence and deter those who would think twice about renewing it. The United States must also take a more proactive approach to remedy the ills of the Muslim nations, if they will allow it. That does not mean abandoning a ban on Muslim immigration; such a ban should be enforced and maintained for as long as necessary. However, it does mean helping to relieve the poverty and oppression of Muslim areas through joint operations to create economic growth and an infrastructure of opportunity.

Nothing remedies misery like opportunity and profit. These should be sought for the good of all, and not just in Muslim lands, but in lands elsewhere around the globe where it is desired by the local people.

It is not the job of Americans or our government to make Muslims part of our country, nor to take on their burdens here. It can be our job, however, to help them take on their burdens in their own countries, to help them develop their own success and profit. Why Muslim countries have not been doing this but instead have wasted their time in religious and political war after war is beyond the ken of the rational mind. Had they channeled the same energy into building up instead of tearing down, who knows how successful those Muslim countries might have become?

Senators McCain and Graham think themselves clever with their superficially softer, more diplomatic approach. The truth is that it has not worked but has only inspired more Muslim mayhem. Former president Barack Obama applied the softer approach for eight years, yet Muslim butchery reached new heights in the United States and in countries around the world, and the Muslim Middle East and North Africa are more war-torn than ever. Mr. McCain and Mr. Graham think their clever artfulness will make the problem smaller. That is a lie, as are their disloyal denunciations of the Republican president.

The truth is, much like with Mrs. Clinton, neither McCain nor Graham, individually or with each other or someone else, has been able to even reduce the problem of Muslim violence, despite their decades of “service” in the Senate. To follow their “lead” is to follow the same ole same ole, which just keeps circling around back to more bloodshed.

A fresh approach, such as the one Mr. Trump is taking and which is placing Americans and America first, is long overdue.

Shameless John McCain

Americans elected Donald Trump their president last November. Not John McCain. Not squeaky Lindsey Graham.

Arizonans elected McCain to represent their interests in the senate. I don’t know why. However, that should constrain McCain from his hyperbolic antics and speech-making. It doesn’t. McCain believes he has some kind of mandate to thwart the reasons Americans elected Trump: to stem the flow of illegal immigration; to stem the flow of Muslim terrorists into the United States; to win the war on terror against ISIL; to help create millions of more jobs by relocating factories back to the U.S. or by helping to build new ones here; to take care of our vets; to repeal and replace Obamacare; to lower taxes; to rebuild and strengthen our military; to help restore law and order nationwide.

McCain isn’t a maverick; he’s a deep-rooted, toxic weed hellbent on strengthening the establishment and weakening Americans and our Constitution. I’d call him a shameless political whore, but that would be incorrect; McCain is a stout narcissist who only finds a worthy cause when he looks into a mirror.

The Arizona senator’s power grab will impede the will of American voters, but my recommendation is that President Trump smack down him and establishment sock puppet Lindsey Graham as quickly as possible, relegating them to meaninglessness. They do not speak for Republicans any more. They do not speak for conservatives. They do not speak for Constitutionalists. They do not speak for Americans.

McCain and Graham speak only for themselves and their cherished establishment, and stridently so, and it’s time to begin to nullify them. McCain’s resume is littered with failure. Was McCain able to win the presidency in 2008? No. Loser. Was he able to enact serious, significant campaign reform? No. Loser. Did he strengthen the U.S. Military his last eight years in the senate? No. Loser. Did he enact or enforce legislation to protect Americans from terrorism? No. Loser. Did he help to balance the budget at all? No. Loser. Did he stop the national debt from increasing by trillions of dollars the last eight years? No. Loser. Did he cut taxes for the middle class? No. Loser. Did he stop the enactment of Obamacare? No. Loser. As a member of the Armed Services Committee, did he prevent huge cost overruns on the F-22 and the F-35 programs, among others? No. Loser. Did he save or create jobs? No. Loser.

Why would such a loser want to pick a fight with a winner like Trump? Call it political penis envy. Old man McCain wants to call the shots, but he’s worried because someone with real success credentials has been voted onto the scene and placed into his sandbox, and McCain will be damned – let’s hope not – if he is going to let someone else call the shots, even though he laid down for Obama all these years.

If you want to accomplish something, don’t bring John McCain and whiny sock puppet Lindsey Graham along. Don’t even try. They won’t cooperate unless they can plunge their mouth-holes into the special interest trough and gobble away like a couple of porkers!

Let McCain try to thwart Trump. Mr. President, we elected you and your ideas and your plans, not loser McCain’s. If he won’t help, cast him aside and work with other, smarter people who want to make this country safe, who stand for America First and not for globalism, who place the interests of American citizens and their culture and their Constitution first and not the interests of illegal aliens and refugee terrorists and strange, violent religious beliefs.

I am so sick of the moralizing social engineers in this country, the people like McCain and Obama who think they get to decide how Americans are going to be shaped and dictated to and who spit on the elections results, our American election results! Get out and go somewhere else!

It’s a Lying Time

The objectivity and quality of American journalism continues its swirling flush down the toilet and into the sewage pipes of liberal advocacy.

Yet another case in point emerged with the delightfully dissembled bit of Time magazine reporting authored by Madeline Farber today, Sunday, Jan. 29^th.

The headline reads. “White House Says It Deliberately Omitted Jews From Holocaust Remembrance Statement.” That is unequivocally false, and the assertion is not supported by any quote that Farber provides.

In this day and age when terrorists and other evil people declare the genocide of World War II never happened, the Time headline and story are a deliberate falsehood meant to inflame passions against President Donald Trump. Establishment media outlets remain bitter over their failed predictions and their failure to elevate Mrs. Hillary Clinton into the presidency by the brute force of their relentless attacks against Mr. Trump and shrill advocacy on behalf of Mrs. Clinton.

The simplest readers might have spotted Time’s deceptive dishonesty when Farber failed to quote from the president’s statement. I provide it here in its entirety, as well as the link:

Statement by the President on International Holocaust Remembrance Day

“It is with a heavy heart and somber mind that we remember and honor the victims, survivors, heroes of the Holocaust. It is impossible to fully fathom the depravity and horror inflicted on innocent people by Nazi terror.

“Yet, we know that in the darkest hours of humanity, light shines the brightest. As we remember those who died, we are deeply grateful to those who risked their lives to save the innocent.

“In the name of the perished, I pledge to do everything in my power throughout my presidency, and my life, to ensure that the forces of evil never again defeat the powers of good. Together, we will make love and tolerance prevalent throughout the world.”

President Trump’s Holocaust Statement 2017

Nowhere in the president’s statement does he “omit” the Jews, nor does the president say in the statement that he has “deliberately omitted the Jews from [the] Holocaust remembrance statement.”

In fact, Farber wrote that when administration spokeswoman Hope Hicks was asked “if Trump purposely left Jews out of his statement to avoid offending anyone”, she quoted Hicks’s reply as, “It was our honor to issue a statement in remembrance of this important day.”

So neither Mr. Trump nor his spokeswoman Ms. Hicks said the White House “deliberately omitted Jews” from the Holocaust statement, as the Time headline claimed falsely.

It was Farber, or whoever asked the question, that framed a false issue. The question quoted as asked two paragraphs above this one necessarily implies that the president’s statement identified other groups who were mass murdered in the death camps but not the Jews. False.

You read in the president’s statement above that the White House remembers and honors all the victims, survivors, and heroes of World War II’s genocide.

Farber lied. Her story lied. Time magazine published the lie. Farber and Time cannot be trusted.

It’s one more example of a lying, dishonest reporter and her dishonest magazine taking a positive by the president and twisting it into a negative to cast a dark shadow of calumny and doubt upon him.

Your candidate lost, Farber and Time magazine, and a more qualified and straightforward person won the election. Deal with it!

More Media Lies

Take a look at these quick examples of media dishonesty, all of which I found at MSN.com.

First a headline from a story printed in the liberal London-based English daily The Guardian: “Four more journalists get felony charges after covering inauguration unrest.” Sounds terrible, doesn’t it? Do you see the assumptions made by the newspaper? Who confirmed that the men arrested were journalists? We don’t want to make any post hoc guesses, but the headline suggests the men were arrested because they were covering unrest at the inauguration. How does the newspaper know one way or another? Maybe they were; maybe they weren’t.

In the story, the writer(s) replace the word “journalists” with “media workers”, a seemingly broader, less specific term than the one used in the headline. Further into the story, at least two of the “journalists” are also called “activists”. Can one be an activist and a journalist?

And then what kind of journalists are the folks arrested? One is called a maker of documentaries, another a “live-streamer”, another a “photojournalist”, and yet another a “freelance journalist”. One begins to sense that at least some of the men may not be journalists at all or that some may, in fact, have participated in the unrest. The story, which can be found here – http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/four-more-journalists-get-felony-charges-after-covering-inauguration-unrest/ar-AAmbHUN?li=BBnb7Kz – does not mention the arrest reports until the end. Those reports state that windows were broken, fires lit, and vehicles damaged.

Second, here’s another headline from a reliable liar, The New York Times: “Trump Won’t Back Down From His Voting Fraud Lie. Here Are The Facts.”

Inside the story, The NYT reports that no evidence has been presented to buttress President Trump’s contention that three to five million illegal immigrants or noncitizens voted in the 2016 presidential election and gave Mrs. Hillary Clinton a hollow raw vote victory. That’s fair and that’s fine. However, that does not make President Trump’s contention a lie; unfounded, yes, a lie, no. But then President Trump has stung The NYT so often by pointing out their prevarications that the newspapers wants to settle the score rather than to report factually.

Third, The New York Times published a story about an executive order Trump will sign that curtails immigration and build the wall along the U.S. Border with Mexico. The NYT article did not mention that a second reason to build the wall was to stem the flow of illegal drugs into the U.S. Below lies the link:

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trump-expected-to-order-mexican-border-wall/ar-AAmcGyu

The NYT promotes an unfounded statement and one lie in this story. The first is that “the Obama administration had already instituted strict screening procedures for Syrian refugees that were designed to weed out anyone who posed a danger.” In some of the secret emails released by Wikileaks, Mrs. Clinton herself bemoaned the inadequacy of our vetting measures. Beyond that, who determined that Obama instituted “strict screening procedures”? How did the newspaper determine whether a screening procedure was “strict” or not? The reader has no basis on which to accept The NYT’s assertion.

Secondly, The NYT then prints a quote which is patently incorrect, if not a lie, when compared to the reporting in other parts of the story. The NYT quoted immigration advocate and activist Marielena Hincapie saying in response to President Trump’s actions, “To think that Trump’s first 100 days are going to be marked by this very shameful shutting of our doors to everybody who is seeking refuge in this country is very concerning.”

Yet the doors are NOT being shut to everybody. Numbers will be reduced, both of legal and illegal immigrants, and refugees from Muslim or terror-prone countries will be banned, at least temporarily. However, some legal immigrants will be allowed. Why did The NYT print the falsehood that the door was being shut to everybody!? Why didn’t they challenge Ms. Hincapie on her statement?

Pundits Like Rachel Maddow Well Inaugurated into Dishonesty

President Donald Trump’s inauguration speech broke new ground for Americans when he stated emphatically he will put their interests and the interests of the nation as a whole first in every policy and law he wants enacted.

Abandoned by a globalist special interest view of the world, Americans suffered loss of jobs, of income, of property, of finances, of freedoms, and of dignity in the years since the Ronald Reagan presidency. Instead of a federal government driven by the will, defense of, and welfare of the American people, Americans were driven by the will, defense of, and welfare of the establishment, its special interests, its media machine partners, and the perverse left-wing globalist philosophy that sought to extinguish our Spirit of ’76 and to reshape the individualist, liberty-loving thinking of Americans to conform to establishment principles and practices.

The establishment has been executing an ongoing pacification of the American people, training them in the docility of political correctness and socially engineering the acceptability of profane, anti-religious norms and the unacceptability of individuality and Godly instruction.

President Trump’s inauguration speech is a massive poke in the eye of the establishment. It breaches their constricting wall by giving the president’s word that American patriotism, life, liberty, prosperity, and defense are the only things that matter. Americans come first. America comes first. Indeed, that is the constitutional mandate of all three branches of our federal government.

Naturally, the establishment and its media machine have been doing and will continue to do everything they can to torpedo Trump’s efforts to Make America Great Again. They will lie, dissemble, mix truth with their lies to confuse and mislead, mis- and disinform, calumniate, and create the illusion that Trump is either evil or mentally unstable or so far out of the mainstream, or some combination of two or more. They will never acknowledge any thing good he does or proposes. They will paint it as something that happened because of forces or circumstances outside of Trump’s control or that happened collaterally, unintentionally.

Here is a case in point: MSNBC pundit Rachel Maddow’s dishonest take on President Trump’s meaning of “America First” in the inauguration speech. Maddow is another media minion who painted President Trump and his supporters nasty reds and blacks with her anti-objective rhetorical graffiti. Like Martha Raddatz, Maddow’s eyes welled with tears election night when it became clear the country favored Mr. Trump as its president instead of the candidate she preferred, Mrs. Hillary Clinton.

Former President Ronald Reagan used the slogan, “Let’s Make America Great Again”, and President Trump wanted to promote that quintessence in his own campaign, though reports vary on when he actually learned that Reagan had used it.

So Maddow does not look through President Trump’s eyes to see what he saw that prompted him to set Make America Great Again as his campaign’s slogan: Americans out of work and out of opportunities and out of money, factories shuttered across the country, a country whose policies its own citizens no longer liked or respected, a country with nearly $20 trillion in debt and adding to it every day, a country whose deep and vast unemployment was masked by bogus government statistics, a country giving away benefits to foreign nations and their illegally migrating people while denying benefits to its own.

No. What Maddow sees in the phrase “America First” is something that Donald Trump is not referring to: an obscure committee formed to keep the United States out of World War II (75 plus years ago before Mr. Trump was born), infiltrated by some Nazis and holding some anti-semitic views.

“It was militant and it was dark”, Maddow sputtered about the speech after the president finished. “The crime, the gangs, the drugs, this American carnage, disrepair, decay – you can’t imagine the outgoing president giving a speech like that.”

She added that President Trump established “our guiding principle will be ‘America First’. We know how he has used that as a campaign slogan. That also has very dark echoes in American history. There was an America First Committee that formed in this country… formed by some of the richest businessmen in this country… who were part of it. They were formed to keep us out of World War II, they were infiltrated by the Nazis. Many of them were anti-semitic, part of why they weren’t alarmed by Hitler’s rise in Germany. The America First Committee is something that means a specific thing in this country. To re-purpose it now is not that far down the historical path. Uh, it’s hard, hard to hear.”

Let’s dissect Ms. Maddow’s baloney. First, the speeches Mr. Obama gave aren’t the bar by which anyone judges the value of other speeches, except, perhaps, for Mr. Obama’s most flattering fanatics.

Second, despite the best efforts of the incredibly untruthful media organs, and Ms. Maddow in this case, when they weren’t covering the elections, and sometimes when they were, the media acknowledged the problems of which President Trump spoke: the lethal and catastrophic effects of drug use on communities around the country, but particularly in places like New Hampshire, the tsunami of murders in Chicago, the horrific damage done by the Mexican drug cartels here and abroad, bloody acts of terror here and around the world that have claimed scores of innocent human lives, factories and lost businesses all across the country, etc.

Third, even the former president, Mr. Obama, has acknowledged the carnage of ISIL and related terrorists and spoke of how we are tirelessly at war with them (dark and militant, Ms. Maddow?), and he himself has stated our national infrastructure had fallen into disrepair and decay. In fact, during his second term, Mr. Obama chided Republicans for the poor state of our country’s infrastructure, and he invoked Reagan’s description of it and his proposal to remedy it to persuade Republicans to enact his (Obama’s) own plan to upgrade it!

That’s the reality, Ms. Maddow. The hope and change Mr. Obama so casually promised never materialized for tens of millions of Americans and for the country as a whole. You didn’t notice their plight, and if you did, you ignored it. President Trump acknowledged to those Americans that he had seen and heard what they had experienced, and he gave his word he would do something about it. One has to take stock, take inventory before proceeding with action. President Trump did that. If the reality was darker than you cared to admit, yet you ignored with malice aforethought the light of the action President Trump said he would take to overcome it: placing Americans first in all policy considerations.

Not only did you ignore President Trump’s action plan, Ms. Maddow, you contrived to link his guiding principle to something you knew was a false connection: a Nazi-influenced committee that happened to have a similar name formed to keep Germany free from American opposition so the Nazis could win WWII! You knew it was false because President Trump’s daughter and son-in-law and their children, his grandchildren, are Jews, Jews who are leaving their businesses to become senior White House advisers. You knew it was false because President Trump has said it may be time to move Israel’s capital to Jerusalem, something I disagree with, but I still love what the guy is trying to do over all.

Which brings us to the fourth point: President Trump has never “re-purposed” anything from the America First Committee, nor can you tie him to the AFC. Fifth, “not that far down the historical path? Really? You failed to supply any signposts or benchmarks that might demonstrate President Trump’s use of America First is powered by the influences or reasoning of anyone who formed the America First Committee of WWII. Do you know why? That’s right, because there aren’t any, none, zero, zilch! Absolutely no connections exist between President Trump’s policy principle of America First and the significance of the same two words in the WWII body called the America First Committee.

How can you be so dishonest, Rachel Maddow?

Unfortunately, that’s what we as citizens must expect from the privileged and prejudiced pundits of the media machine. Lying has become second nature to them. They will tell us what they think we need to know, how we should adjust our perceptions so we “understand correctly”, and how we should judge what we know, ceding all authority and individuality to them.

Ain’t gonna happen!

I am willing to listen to what the new president has to say, what he thinks is dark and light, and to make up my own mind about what the problems are and the solutions he proposes to rectify them. America First has NOTHING to do with Nazis and antisemitism, so keep your lies to yourself, prejudiced, privileged pundits.

Hacking the Russian Hack Story

• Problems with the Press Accounts of the Intel ‘Report’
• Tangible Media and Intel Animus toward President-Elect Trump
• If the Russians Hacked the DNC, Could It Have Been for Bernie?

Like an arrogant rhinoceros waving its wand and puckering its starfish to piss and crap all over the jungle, the media continues to spew and drop faux and fraudulent news and statements and headlines about soon-to-be President Donald Trump and his administration, angling their themes to paint him with dark or doubtful stains.

The dishonest media isn’t alone. At least some of the heads of our American intelligence agencies, and their minions, have compromised the integrity of the agencies they run, polluting the operations with a thoroughly toxic left-wing, selfishly anti-democratic, anti-transition, and anti-collegial spirit. Amid this boiling toxicity, these heads have cooked up intel reports and summaries to damage the president, his cabinet and staff, his program, and our country.

That’s the way establishments are: see things our way and do them our way… or else.

One more day!

I cannot wait until Mr. Trump’s intel, military, and justice (as well as all the others: Go Wilbur Ross!) heads take command on Jan. 20 and CLEAN house of all the lying bastards who have polluted our intelligence and our intelligence agencies with their Buzzfeed mentalities.

Let’s tackle – again – the 35-page report presented by overall intelligence chief James Clapper to the president-elect, the president, and a few members of Congress. We know only what the unclassified version says, not the classified, so we are missing valuable pieces to the puzzle that could confirm what the intelligence agencies allegedly surmised or could disconfirm or cast doubt on those impressions.

In essence, Clapper’s report alleged that Russia conducted a cyber attack on servers run by the Democratic National Committee and used the information they gleaned to hurt Hillary Clinton and help Donald Trump get elected.

Is that true? Let’s examine the story as it appeared in The New York Times online edition on or about Jan. 7. Adam Goldman, Matthew Rosenberg, and Matt Apuzzo authored the piece.

What The NYT gives us first is:

“President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia directed a vast cyberattack aimed at denying Hillary Clinton the presidency and installing Donald J. Trump in the Oval Office, the nation’s top intelligence agencies said in an extraordinary report they delivered on Friday [Jan. 6] to Trump.”

That’s the lead paragraph in the story. Make a note that The NYT labeled the report “extraordinary”. Two paragraphs later, The NYT adds:

“Soon after leaving the meeting, intelligence officials released the declassified, damning report (emphasis mine) that described the sophisticated cybercampaign as part of a continuing Russian effort to weaken the United States government and its democratic institutions.”

That’s heavy stuff. The report is damning, presumably for Mr. Trump, and Russia seeks to weaken our federal government and our democratic institutions.

The problem is twofold: 1. how is Trump damned by the report? The Russians have been interfering with our government for decades, and we have been interfering with theirs and with many other governments for decades. Trump isn’t damned by the report; the intelligence and defense communities are damned by the report for failing to adequately deal with any cyber threat from a foreign power! Why were the Russians able to catch them napping?

Second, the Democratic National Committee that was hacked is NOT a democratic institution. Political parties come and go, evolve and morph and become totally different over the course of years. No particular party is an institution. The Democrat Party did not even exist at the dawn of our republic. The DNC is part of the current political fabric, but it’s not one of our democratic institutions.

Now consider the following two points which The NYT buried deeply in its article. The first occurs around paragraph 27, at which the article stated:

“Yet the attacks [by Russia], the report said, began long before anyone could have known that Mr. Trump, considered a dark horse, would win the Republican nomination. It said the attacks began as early as 2015… .”

The article adds that the Russians maintained a presence on the DNC server for another 11 months, perhaps even after the private firm Crowdstrike thought it had them booted off.

Two final points to note: First, the DNC denied the FBI permission to look at its servers. This point does not appear in The NYT article but has been reported extensively elsewhere. It isn’t clear whether the DNC allowed any other federal agencies access, but isn’t it suspicious the DNC denied the FBI access when Democrats were complaining about an illegal hack?

Second, the evolution of Russian purposes reported by The NYT doesn’t add up. Overly eager to lay blame on Mr. Trump, the intel heads and the paper admit the Russians began to hack the DNC server in the summer of 2015, when Trump was one of 17 Republican presidential candidates, and the Brits first alerted American intel ops about the DNC hack in the autumn of 2015, but the CIA and other agencies are just writing a report about it now. Why didn’t they do something then!?

So the Russian purpose for the hack was, and always has been, to hurt Hillary Clinton. This stands as a vital point, because it would not have made any difference who the Republican nominee was. The Russians did not know who it would be.

Trump was part of a large pack of candidates in the running at the end of 2015, with commentators and pundits repeatedly saying he had hit a ceiling and would never win the Republican nomination. Five of the 17 Republican candidates dropped out of the presidential race just before the Iowa caucuses; still, Trump lost the Iowa caucuses on February 1, 2016. Although Trump picked up steam afterward, he also hit a rough stretch punctuated by a stinging defeat in Wisconsin on April 5. It could not have been clear to the Russians he enjoyed any significant chance to win his party’s nomination until he took every delegate in the May 3, 2016, Indiana primary.

Even then, with talk bubbling about a contested convention, the Russian mindset about Trump’s chances likely exhibited a similarity to that of Julian Assange and other foreign onlookers (Assange’s quote is from website ZeroHedge):

“My analysis is that Trump would not be permitted to win. Why do I say that? Because he has had every establishment off his side. Trump does not have one establishment, maybe with the exception of the Evangelicals, if you can call them an establishment. Banks, intelligence, arms companies, foreign money, etc. are all united behind Hillary Clinton. And the media as well. Media owners, and the journalists themselves.”

By the time Mr. Trump won Indiana, the alleged Russian hack of the DNC server was almost over.

The Russians must have figured, as did every political pundit in this country, that Mr. Trump would never defeat Mrs. Clinton. If they did plan and execute the DNC hack to release Democrats’ own secret, damaging information, they wanted to undermine her presidency, as the NYT story and other stories have reported. They may have chuckled that collaterally, at some point, they were “helping” Trump, but NO ONE outside of his supporters thought he had any chance of winning against Hillary Clinton.

In fact, what the media are deliberately NOT writing and talking about is the possibility that Russia, if it hacked the DNC, intended its damage to Mrs. Clinton’s already eroded reputation to help Bernie Sanders. Mr. Sanders is the socialist candidate who had visited Russia years before when it was communist and whose policy proposals most reflected the way Mr. Putin wields centralized power in Russia.

The hypocrisy of it all is that American intel agencies spy on their fellow citizens, the citizens whose privacy and dignity they are sworn to uphold and respect. Even as Clapper excoriates Russia, his agencies gobble up every minute detail about Americans and their lives, analyze it, and store it forever in case it is needed. They intrude into Americans’ computers, tablets, phones, GPSes, TVs, microphones, and every communication. In cahoots with big business, they have become the all-seeing eye!

It is so wrong and so unconstitutional.

So stop your calumny of Mr. Trump, intel agencies. Do what you are supposed to do: obey your commander-in-chief and the will of the American people. Collect accurate intelligence and present it without passion or prejudice. Keep your mouths shut on domestic political issues. Don’t talk and write about hacks after they have happened; stop them from happening!

Beware the Email War – Not!

The war to discredit Donald Trump’s presidency escalated Wednesday when Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) asked America’s director of national intelligence whether the alleged Russian hacks of some members of the Democrat National Committee constituted “an act of war.”

James Clapper, appearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee, declined to make that call, saying it was beyond the purview of the intelligence community. Clapper did stand by a previously published assessment that the Russians butted into American politics when they hacked those emails, which were published during the presidential campaign by Wikileaks. Clapper continued to argue that Russia butted in to help elect Trump or to help defeat Clinton.

President-Elect Trump is scheduled to meet with key members of the intelligence community Friday. He has maintained it is impossible to know for certain who hacked the Democrats, and he has cited Wikileaks founder Julian Assange’s contention that his organization did not receive the emails from the Russians or any “state party” as evidence against a Russian hack.

This particular line of attack on Trump’s presidency aims to portray him as a democracy destroyer who wanted the Russian hack to negate the real wishes of voters, which would have been to elect Hillary Clinton.

However, the intelligence community has admitted that no voting machines nor any vote tallies were hacked or manipulated by the Russians, and various news outlets have reported that the intelligence community remains uncertain about what impact the hacks and publishing of the Democrat emails had on the election outcome, if any.

Hacking itself is illegal, although it is generally acknowledged that competing or enemy countries routinely attempt to hack each other, sometimes succeeding.

The question for American citizens is what to make of this story. McCain’s hyperbolic question to Clapper, was the hack “an act of war”, shows itself as little more than inglorious grandstanding and a desperate effort to make a mountain out of a mole hill.

Why? Because McCain already knew the answer to the question, which was the negative, and which rendered the question as not worthy of being asked. How do we know? Because if McCain believed the alleged Russian hack constituted an act of war, he could have moved for a declaration of war or an authorization of war in the Senate. Has he ever done that? Absolutely not!

In fact, McCain’s sly attempt to disingenuously shift the onus of determination to the national intelligence director scammed American citizens. It was theater. McCain is the lawmaker and the putative statesman. A declaration or authorization for war, or the grounds that merit such, is his and his fellow lawmaker’s call, and the president’s; it isn’t the call of a subordinate who reports to lawmakers and to the president! The intelligence community provides the data to help decision-makers decide. The president and our lawmakers analyze, make sense of, evaluate, and render judgment.

So when Clapper told McCain that calling the alleged Russian hack “an act of war” was not his to make, he meant that in just the way I have described, which is quite telling. Will McCain seek a declaration or authorization for war? Nah! No one is going to war over a few pinched Democrat emails, emails the media should have pursued and published but which they did not.

Those emails had information which every voter had a right to know. They detailed the Democrats true intentions, their condescension toward and condemnation of various ethnic, racial, and religious groups not in agreement with them, and their deliberate hypocrisy in showing voters a faux political persona while sharing their real persona secretly to the wealthy insiders who owned them.

So McCain can stand on top of the tallest soap box he can find and shout at the top of his lungs, as can Democrat Congressman Adam Schiff and a whole host of others who want to make hay out of the alleged Russian hack. We’re not going to war because pinching a few Democrat emails isn’t worth it.

But think of the hypocrisy, my fellow citizens! Our government is spying on us. It listens and watches and reads everything. It intercepts and catalogs every phone call, email, text message, etc., and stores them for future reference (think of Person of Interest). And the big corporations are doing the same thing!

As a citizen, I am not going to rally around a cry of wolf toward Russia when our own government and our own businesses betray our ideals of privacy and respect in the name of “security” and “a more personalized experience”.

Yes, I want to win the cyber war, which has been going on for some time and with worse incidents than the hack of Democrat emails. Let’s keep everything in perspective, however, and let’s keep our intelligence agencies honest and honoring of our tradition of maximum individual liberty.

Now, if only we could keep the media honest… .

So, McCain, stop trying to hinder the changes and improvements Trump will make. Stop trying to incapacitate your president and force him to accept only your agenda, which Americans do NOT want. You better get on the train and help Trump make America great again, and that includes a wall along the border.

Throw the Russian Hack Story in the Trash

The media will not let go of the story about the hacked emails of Democratic Party leaders and operatives. They and the political establishment continue to assert that Russia hacked the emails and likely used them to favor Trump’s election or to defeat Hillary Clinton’s.

The media effort seeks to brand the hack as an “election hack”, an equivocal term that many media readers/viewers/listeners mistake to mean that election machines or vote tallies were tampered with, an intentional manipulation of perception that is patently false.

The media cites a “report” by the CIA and other intelligence agencies. However, that report essentially provides no details to the press, naturally, to preserve security, choosing out of necessity to offer a summary of conclusions. Omitted are the details of what those agencies discovered, how their information was obtained, and how it was analyzed and interpreted to point the finger at Russia.

What and how much the president and president-elect have been told remains a secret. Perhaps we’ll learn more when the intelligence community briefs Donald Trump on Friday.

The president-elect Trump has disputed the intelligence findings, citing Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, who has said on multiple occasions that Wikileaks did not receive the hacked Democrat emails from Russia or from any “state party”.

In the analyses of what the intelligence community has reported, commentators have stated that the intelligence agencies made their conclusion in part based on certain digital “signatures” hackers use to gain access to computer users.

What I have not seen asked or answered is whether such signatures can be found out and duplicated by other hackers who want the trail to lead to another person or group besides themselves.

On the other hand, if Wikileaks did not receive the data from the Russians, it must be asked whether it was possible for a third party to deliver the data to Wikileaks after receiving it from the Russians and whether that happened.

The problem with the story is the political grandstanding it has created by both Democrat and Republican establishment politicians. All those officeholders want voters to think the election was hacked, that America’s security was breached, and that Americans and their democracy were endangered. They do so for individual and collective motivations, all unpleasantly selfish.

Whether you agree with or like Mr. Trump or not, his campaign and election smashed the iron grip the establishment and its media purveyors held on electioneering and American life. Campaigns of both parties had fallen always within a certain range of mutual acceptability, and the process was monolithicized to prevent outsiders from gaining sway and the American public from being heard, respected, and obeyed.

Instead, the establishment members transmogrified the elections of our democratic republic into their personal power scheme, where the issues they cared about were nurtured and nourished and the common American was manipulated or ignored. Americans had to adapt to the political establishment rather than the political establishment adapting to Americans. The result was massive disappointment, economic and cultural neglect, the diminishment of the desired quality of life, and the marginalization of the American public at large.

That establishment and media effort continues, and the alleged Russian hack is one of its cornerstones. Trump is bad, and by extension his nominees and his policy proposals are bad, because he is the reason democracy is in danger, they have said or implied. He’s a dirty cheat who did anything to get elected, and he suborned the Russian hack when he asked for their cyber help to expose Hillary Clinton’s dirty secrets, dishonesty, and hypocrisy.

That is how threatened the political establishment and the media are. Don’t believe them. They are the liars and cheats, and if Trump is the same, at least he is lying and cheating for us. They seek only their own benefit and ours collaterally, just enough to keep us quiet.

I believe Trump believes in Americans and America first. I have no reason to think otherwise, but those whose iron grip on power he has loosened have reason to want you and me to think otherwise: so they can steal back what they lost even though it wasn’t theirs to begin with!

Don’t fall for it.

The second problem with the story is that it undermines America’s response to the Russians if, in fact, they did hack a private organization. As a citizen, I don’t need a lot of fanfare and hyperbolic, faux congressional questioning and a huge, 500-page report no one will read. I want our intelligence agencies to quietly and patiently strike back at the right time, improving our security and breaking through theirs, which is what they have been doing (hopefully) all along.

We expect our enemies and competitors to spy on us, just as we are spying on them. For the grandstanders to act like the hack of Democrat emails was something shocking and dangerous to democracy is to diminish the significance of what a truly detrimental hack would be: on actual voting machines and vote tallies; on our power grid, knocking out electricity to whole swaths of the country in the dead of winter; on our nuclear and conventional arsenals, turning a simulation or a war game into an actual attack; on our nuclear power plants; on our banking, robbing people and businesses of their identities and their finances; on our air traffic and maritime and railroad and ground traffic controls and signals, to name just a few. Those could result in catastrophe: loss of life and destruction or disappearance of property on a massive scale.

The political establishment and the media want to direct your attention to fake news and to redirect your attention away from what is vital and critical: hackers threaten their machinations and help to upend their grip on power. Hacked emails reveal how they genuinely think and feel, the private persona that contradicts the phony public persona they portray to common Americans, like you and me. I don’t care what their political stripes are: they are liars and cheats hellbent on hoodwinking the American public and preserving their power.

What is the first thing the GOP tried to do when the 115^th Congress opened? Shut down the independent ethics counsel! How rotten was that? How impudent and imprudent was that? We have so many things to make right and to do to make this country great again, and the first thing the GOP house members try to do is rid themselves of the agency that investigates congressional misdeeds!

Do not be misled. Toss the Russian hack story where it belongs: File 13. Be watchful. Work to keep our republican democracy alive and healthy. Stay free and independent, my friends!