Nip-Slip Media Goes After CINC

I get tired of being proven right when I don’t want to be.

Today CNN has a story. President Trump had a screaming, knock-down, chair-throwing fight with insiders Steve Bannon and Reince Priebus. And how do they know that? BECAUSE THEY SHOT GRAINY, INCONCLUSIVE VIDEO THROUGH THE WHITE HOUSE WINDOWS WITH A TELEPHOTO LENS.

This is how crazy the left has gotten. They are literally stalking the president.

Raise your hand if you remember all those times the American press made voyeur videos of Obama and then blew them up all over the Internet.

Me, neither.

Go watch the video. I did. Here’s what I saw: some figures are in the White House, talking. Bannon’s face is visible. You can see a guy who looks like Jared Kushner. You can see the back of a blonde woman’s head. Bannon seems a little excited. For a few seconds.

If you can see anything more than that, I credit you on your exceptional eyesight or, in the case of CNN, imagination.

CNN’s talking head claims Reince Priebus is in the video, but I can’t see him. If I recall correctly from personal experience, Reince is about 5’2″ tall, so he would not be that easy to spot.

I went to college with Barack Obama and law school with Reince Priebus. Unexpected difference: people I know actually remember Reince.

Bill Clinton held Dick Morris down and choked him. Why was there no kerfuffle? No one cared. No one in the press was out to get Clinton. CNN never got exiled to the sidewalk during the Clinton years.

When I think about Trump, I always think of the expression “to damn with faint praise.” You know what it means. Andy Griffith provided a famous example: “You don’t sweat much for a fat girl.” The other side of the coin is praising with faint damnation. The press makes Trump look good by hammering him over insignificant or imaginary faults.

Trump got mad! We think! IMPEACH! IMPEACH!

Seriously?

I’d be mad, too, if I just found out my business was wiretapped. Actually, I am mad, because I did find out I was wiretapped. We’re all wiretapped. All of our communications go into government servers, in a violation of the Fourth Amendment no judge seems brave enough to call out. I found that out quite some time ago. The conspiracy nuts were right. How can that happen?

Digression.

Rush Limbaugh calls the MSM “the Drive-By Media.” Maybe we should call them “the Taxi Driver Media,” or “the Fatal Attraction Media.”

I hope Baron Trump doesn’t have any pet rabbits.

Here’s a nutty idea: how about covering things that actually happened, instead of things you really hope happened?

Trump and journalists share a common flaw: the inability to admit fault. Trump rarely, if ever, says he made a mistake. When Trump rightly says people don’t trust the press, only a tiny handful of journalists discusses the possibility that there is a reason for their unpopularity.

Trump didn’t create the notion that the press is unfair. The public figured that out a long time ago. The only novel thing about Trump is that he talks about it while serving as president. The press has been crazy-biased for decades, and they refuse to admit it. How can you expect someone to take you seriously as an institution that gathers and reports facts, when you think you’re immune to bias? It’s patently insane.

The press is trying to tell us Trump threw Priebus and Bannon off Air Force One. They said he told them they couldn’t fly to Florida with him. Sounds juicy! Oops…it turns out he said they should stay in Washington and work, because a lot of things are going on right now. Not really the same thing, is it?

What is wrong with these people? Can’t they even try to be fair?

The devil’s people hate Trump because he’s helpful to Christians and Israel. That’s the bottom line. Trump is not a man of God, but what’s happening to him is still religious persecution, because the primary motivation behind the left’s rage is hatred of Christians and Jews. What we’re seeing now is the reeking blossom of a new age of open persecution from respected institutions.

If you think it’s bad now, wait a few years.

I have a new level of empathy for illegal aliens. I wish I could emigrate to heaven. This place is completely out of hand. Unfortunately, God’s border patrol has a perfect record. I will have to wait here, south of the border, as my asylum claim gets better and better.

I’m glad I’m as old as I am. I would hate to be 20 and have maybe 70 years of this craziness stretching out before me. I don’t know how the apostles dealt with it.

Poor President Trump. Wiretaps at home, and peeping toms at the office. The first paparazzi president. I should quit looking at Fox and CNN. From now on, I’ll just check TMZ. Maybe Trump will get out of his limo carelessly and show CNN his underwear. “GOP ROCKED BY REINCE PRIEBUS SEX TAPE!!!”

When is checkout time? My bags are just about packed.

“Living Dead” Shadow Co-President Accused of Spying on Trump

What a strange presidency we have.

When Trump got elected, I predicted two things: 1) whatever Trump did, he would do better than politicians, because he’s an extremely competent businessman who knows how to accomplish things, and 2) his presidency would be very, very entertaining. As of today, I think prediction 2 has been proven right. Trump just accused Obama–personally–of wiretapping Trump Tower during the 2016 campaign.

Since I’m making two-item lists today, I’ll continue. There are two possible outcomes here: 1) Trump will be proven mainly right, and it will be a big embarrassment for Obama and the left, or 2) Trump will be found to be overreacting to a Breitbart story that came from Mark Levin, and it will be a big embarrassment for Trump and the Republicans.

I feel like making a guess.

My guess is that Trump will be proven mainly right.

Here’s how I see it: as president, Trump has deep access to classified information, and he has lots of power to force bureaucrats to do research and answer questions for him. Maybe he was motivated by the Levin story, but that was yesterday, and he didn’t make his wiretapping tweet until today, so he has had ample time to get on the phone and scream at people. It may well be that he has been up all night dragging people into the Oval Office and forcing them to give him briefings.

Trump made his announcements at around 5:30 a.m. today. That suggests he didn’t sleep last night. There is no reason for a president to be up in the middle of the night on a random Saturday, so if he tweeted at 5:30, he had probably been awake for quite some time, and the most likely explanation is that he was digging into the wiretap story. I don’t think he woke up at 5:15 to use the toilet and said to himself, “What a great night’s sleep I had. I think I’ll say something completely insane on Twitter, which could destabilize my administration.”

Trump said “Just found out.” It could mean he was up before 5:30, for some trivial reason, and some aide or other came up to him and said, “Hey, did you read Levin’s story?” It could also mean he had been putting the screws on people all night, and he got his solid evidence not long before 5:30. That’s the most likely explanation, because if he was simply responding to Levin’s emotionalism, it would be uncharacteristically impulsive, even for Donald Trump, who loves to talk off the top of his head. It would also be very foolish; too foolish to be likely.

It’s as though Trump learned something shocking, and it enraged him, and he decided to stay up all night and make some heads roll.

If Trump is wrong about Obama, he can be sued successfully for libel. He’s not an imbecile; he is aware of the existence of tort lawyers. I don’t think he would expose himself to a lawsuit unnecessarily. Obama would love to hinder the Trump administration by dragging a sitting president into court. I can’t see Trump opening himself to that move.

Weird as it sounds, the most likely explanation, given the facts I have now, is that Trump has the goods on Obama. Maybe he’s exaggerating things a little, and maybe the “wiretaps” he has mentioned aren’t the simple phone bugs the rest of us think of when we hear that word, but Obama probably collected intelligence, using wires (email, Internet feeds, whatever), and if it wasn’t illegal, it was probably ethically questionable.

Obama is the first zombie president. When a president leaves office, the classy, patriotic, and traditional thing is to go away and be quiet for at least two terms. Obama is setting up headquarters in DC, and he plans to make life miserable for Trump. What a strange man he is. It reminds me of the silly fake presidential seal he used to use before he was elected. He was like a little kid, playing cowboys and Indians, wearing a plastic sheriff’s badge.

He pretended to be president before he had standing, and now it looks like he’s going to pretend to be president after becoming unemployed. I think he wants to condition the press to listen to Trump and then rush across town to see what The Other President says.

This is a remarkable confrontation. Neither Trump nor Obama can continue without taking steps to resolve this. Trump has to prove his accusations, or Obama has to disprove them. If Obama disproves them, Trump will look like a real idiot, and he may face a painful lawsuit. He could even be pressured into resigning simply because a president can’t run around accusing his predecessors of wiretapping. If Trump proves them, Obama will be disgraced, and he could even face felony charges, along with a number of other people in his administration.

Obviously, I prefer the latter alternative. I support Trump, and whatever his faults may be, I want him (or some other Republican) in the White House when Ruth Ginsberg dies.

An interesting thing about this kerfuffle is that Obama has a plausible path to prison here, but Trump’s worst-case path leads only to financial pain and forced retirement.

I just don’t think Trump is crazy enough to make these accusations without checking his legal footing. Trump is a weird guy, and he tends to think out loud instead of waiting for corroboration, but he’s not a complete moron. He’s very, very sharp.

My best guess, and a guess is all it is, is that people who jump for Obama surveilled Trump, and Trump can prove it.

Now, what will happen when Trump proves Obama’s people spied on him?

My opinion can be discerned from my use of the phrase “Obama’s people.” Obama isn’t an utter idiot (I assume), any more than Trump is. He’s naive, gullible, feckless, and incredibly conceited, but he has a normal instinct for self-preservation. If Obama spied on Trump, he used layers of surrogates. If wrongdoing is proven, there will be a whole squad of potential Scooter Libbys waiting to receive the skewer in Obama’s stead.

If Obama is behind this, and he didn’t take great pains to insulate himself from responsibility, then his arrogance is even worse than we thought, and that would be remarkable.

It’s possible. Obama has been careless before, and he tends to screw up and then wait for the press to save him. He seems to have delusions of invulnerability. He seems to see himself as The Chosen One, and a lot of his fans agree. I wonder if he’s crazy enough to wiretap a presidential candidate. Hmm. Nixon was smarter than Obama, and…

We don’t have to consider the possibility that Obama is morally above something like this. We know him better than that.

I suppose there is a third possibility. Deep State intelligence people hate Trump, and they like sandbagging him and setting him up. A really sharp, unpatriotic, and unscrupulous group of spooks could harm Trump very badly by feeding him false information and leading him to accuse Obama wrongly. I wonder if they could pull that off.

I might get hammered for this (by one of the two people who read this unimportant blog), but it seems like there is a common pattern in which a black person or group of blacks crosses a threshold of power that had previously been an impregnable stronghold, and then they blow it. Bill Cosby is an example. So is Michael Vick. The first black player on the University of Kentucky basketball team, which was coached by a ferocious racist, turned out to be a rapist. For some reason, black people tend to gain control of things that are already in decline or headed for disaster. It must be a supernatural thing. I wonder if it’s at play here.

It’s not uncommon for prominent black people to end up in trouble with the law. It’s very strange. Ray Nagin. Al Sharpton. Kwame Kilpatrick. O.J. Simpson. Wesley Snipes, Lauryn Hill, James Brown, Jesse Jackson Jr. and his wife…

Imagine the outcry we would hear if Obama were indicted. “They won’t let a black man win.” Black Lives Matter would go nuclear. We would never hear the end of it.

As for the outcome of the wiretap fuss, I’m just guessing for entertainment purposes. I’m not pretending to be a pundit. Guessing is fun. The older you get, the more you know about human nature, and the better you get at predicting people’s behavior. I like exercising that skill. Wrong or right, I enjoy it. I do pretty well.

I won’t enjoy it if Trump gets the worst of this. I voted as well as I could, and I prayed for Hillary to fail. That was all I could do. I can’t control the world. I’m not going to eat my liver over it.

Now, let’s make the popcorn.

More

I can’t stop thinking about this story.

Think about this: when you and I go to the airport, and we are sexually violated by the TSA, no one cares. The government now monitors all of our car travel via electronic toll devices, cameras, license plate scanners, and roadside sensors. I didn’t read about that somewhere. I figured it out by looking out the car window. The government looks for us in public places using facial recognition. The government collects our emails and phone calls, and that goes for all of us, not just radicalized Muslims.

No one cares. We’re nobodies. The Constitution is dead, except for the imaginary parts that permit homosexual “marriage” and let women kill their own babies. Our outrage and pain don’t matter, even though insult and personal outrage are the very reasons the Bill of Rights was written.

Now, suddenly, a PRESIDENT may have been violated, by another president! Finally, someone who matters is suffering. How about that? What will happen now?

Will the spooks and hacks sit Trump down and convince him we have no choice but to abandon the Constitution? The spooks will say life with no rights is better than being blown up by Muslims. The hacks will say life with no rights is better than having terrorist attacks on Trump’s watch, which could cost him the next election. Will Trump listen?

Most voters don’t care about their rights. The legendary American love of liberty is a complete myth. Americans don’t really love liberty, except when it comes to vices. Tell an American he can’t smoke weed or look at pornography, and he’ll get very upset. Tell him you’re recording all of his phone calls even though he has nothing to do with terrorists, and he’ll bless you for it.

Here’s a funny thing about human nature: people in authority don’t care at all about injustice, but they lose their minds when people insult their dignity or power.

If you call a cop because someone stole your bicycle, he won’t look for it. You will never see it again; I guarantee it. Have you ever known anyone who got their stolen goods back through police action? Me, neither. Give a cop the finger, which is completely legal, and he will make you his number one case. He will find a way to cite you or arrest you. As a matter of fact, that happened to a cousin of mine.

One of the best ways to get a judge to stomp your adversary is to make the judge think he, himself, has been insulted. It has worked for me. Cite the judge’s own holy words, show him opposing counsel has blasphemed him, and he will drop the whole courthouse on your opponent’s head. Citing your own problems and your adversary’s misdeeds may not even wake a judge up. Judges are lazy, and so are their clerks. They just want you out of their hair.

Human nature. Look at it objectively, and you will rarely come to the wrong conclusion.

If Obama wiretapped Trump illegally or unethically, or even if he did it legally and simply made Trump mad, Trump may look for ways to attack our Orwellian captivity, simply to avenge what happened to him.

That’s interesting, to say the very least.

More

Finally, Obama has finished polishing up his response. Through a spokesman, here it is:

A cardinal rule of the Obama administration was that no White House official ever interfered with any independent investigation led by the Department of Justice. As part of that practice, neither President Obama nor any White House official ever ordered surveillance on any U.S. citizen. Any suggestion otherwise is simply false.

Okay, let’s put on our special cynicism goggles and look for the real meaning.

“No White House official ever interfered.” Notice it says “White House official,” not “administration official” or “surrogate” or “executive department personnel.” If Obama had been able to say, “It never happened,” why didn’t he say it? He’s just deflecting blame from his inner circle, which is one of the possibilities I predicted. A lot of people who worked for Obama could have wiretapped Trump, and only a small percentage worked in the White House.

Obama was the head of the executive branch, so if anyone in that branch wiretapped Trump, it’s Obama’s baby and he has to breastfeed it.

He says no White House official interfered with an independent DOJ investigation. Let’s see. Are there investigations that aren’t independent? Nixon’s investigations of his political enemies were not exactly independent. Are there investigations that aren’t handled by the DOJ? The CIA isn’t part of the DOJ. Neither is DHS.

What we have here is a carefully worded non-denial that took several hours to draw up. Obama may be setting some underling up for a spell at Club Fed. On the other hand, if Trump is completely wrong, maybe Obama is trying to bait him into parsing his flak’s words, just as I am right now. Obama baited the birthers, including Trump, by postponing the release of his long-form birth certificate, and they looked bad when it came out, even though the official who signed it was named Ukulele.

Here is my guess: Trump is right, and Obama will throw a lackey under the bus. Obama’s bus can hardly move for the bodies stuck to the undercarriage, so this would be a continuation of SOP. George Bush probably has a furnished apartment under that bus.

If I’m right, there is a there, there, and Obama is trying to move there to somewhere else.

The press is all over this. They’re 100% in the tank for Obama, even though they haven’t had time to investigate. They are risking humiliation by covering this story as if Trump has already been proven wrong. Many are leading with the statement that Trump misspelled “taps” on Twitter, as if that were the real news here. That’s about as brazenly biased as a journalist can get without wearing a ball cap with the words “I am Lying” emblazoned on the front.

This could be a major time bomb in the laps of the MSM. Trump makes true accusation. Press crucifies Trump without checking the facts. Trump produces proof he’s right. That would be a real nitroglycerin enema.

If Trump is wrong, things will be pretty bad for the GOP for a month.

Wonder what will happen next.

Eating Clean for the Mind

I finished Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle. I enjoyed it. I knocked it off in three or four days, which shows the difference between reading things you enjoy and things you only read out of duty. I’ve been suffering while reading relatively small passages from the books on the Columbia College Lit. Hum. syllabus. Reading 50 pages of Philip K. Dick in one day is a pleasure. Reading 20 pages of Cervantes is a chore.

Dick is very clever, but I don’t think he’s all that deep. Here’s one thing you notice about him right away: all of his characters sound the same. It’s as if one person is talking all through the book. In that respect, he resembles Ayn Rand. Maybe Rand wrote that way because her books involved two opposing sets of characters, and the characters in each set shared the same mind. Dagney Taggart and Hank Rearden were pretty much the same person.

Perhaps, like most people who write science fiction, he was more interested in the physical world than in human beings and their personalities.

When I put his book down, I finally got to open Helmet for My Pillow, the first-person World War Two chronicle written by marine Robert Leckie. His book, along with one by fellow marine Eugene Sledge, was used as a basis for the Band of Brothers companion series, The Pacific.

While I’ve been reading Leckie’s book, I’ve continued watching the Ken Burns series, The War, which also covers World War Two.

I had a disturbing revelation last night, after watching the show. The War followed the story of a soldier named Corado Ciarli, who died as part of the invasion force that landed at Anzio. The Anzio invasion and the ensuing campaign have been criticized as incompetent and very wasteful of human life. General Mark Clark took too long preparing to attack the Germans, and by the time he felt ready, they, too, were prepared. They spent weeks showering the Allies with bullets and artillery rounds from high ground, and there was very little cover on the ground below.

The soldiers in the invasion suffered terribly. Ciarlo wrote home very often, and guess what he told his family? Nothing. He said he was in great health. He bragged about how much he ate. He kept telling them he wished them the best. Meanwhile, he was living in a hole, waiting to die.

He had two brothers, a sister, and a mother back in Waterbury, Connecticut. He could have vented to them in order to reduce his own stress. Instead he kept it light. Because he loved them so much, he put their welfare first.

Here’s the revelation: my life has been pretty twisted. I grew up in a city where people are nasty and aggressive. I don’t know what it feels like to have a sibling I can write to the way Ciarlo wrote to his. I can’t imagine filling letters home full of expressions of love and praise. My family was not like that.

My neighbors had screwed-up families, too. A gay man across the street tied his lover up and murdered him, castrating him in the process. The family across 10th Avenue lost a son to a heroin overdose; one night, an ambulance appeared at the house, and the next day one of the kids told my sister, “My brother died,” as if he were talking about a visit from a TV repairman. The lady next door had a heroin-addict son who slapped her around, and her release was vodka, which she chugged from water tumblers.

I can’t imagine what it’s like to live in a healthy environment. I lived in Texas for a few years, but I was a graduate student in a physics department, so I was exposed to a lot of dysfunctional people. Texas was my best shot at normal life, and it didn’t work out.

I watched the war shows and learned about the veterans, and I realized their outlook on life was far superior to mine. Their values were much healthier. They grew up before Saturday Night Live, The National Lampoon, South Park, The Family Guy, and M*A*S*H (book, movie, and series). They weren’t constantly bombarded with filthy, counterproductive entertainment. It’s no wonder they were nicer people than I am.

Last night it occurred to me that reading Leckie’s book and watching these war shows was good for me. It was exposure to a frame of mind I didn’t know much about, even at my age.

Now, what about Lit. Hum.?

I’ve been thinking about the books I’ve read so far. Homer, Plato, Boccaccio, Virgil, Cervantes, and so on. For the most part, they’re not helpful. They’re morally corrosive.

Homer and Virgil lionized immature, lustful, greedy, sadistic morons who actually preferred war to peace. Plato praised a lifestyle in which homosexual predators “helped” young boys by having depraved relationships with them. Boccaccio is cynical and sexually amoral. Cervantes comes across as a sociopath who doesn’t know it when his sadism crosses the line and offends readers.

Ovid was full of whining. It’s like his book was written by the Cathy Bates character from Misery, or Glenn Close’s famous attention-starved would-be murderess. One bitter, unforgiving female stalker after another. A churning sea of daddy issues.

Herodotus and Thucydides weren’t too bad, but they were hardly uplifting.

Shakespeare stands out. King Lear promotes moral standards I can agree with. Fathers should stand up and be fathers. Children should love and honor their parents. Kings should be kings, not hosts of traveling debauches. Men in power should listen to good advice from people of proven character. Shakespeare is a good influence. But one robin doesn’t make a spring.

My social environment is bad. Much of the entertainment and study I’ve chosen during my life has been harmful to me. I have let these factors shape me into a person for whom my respect is necessarily limited.

What should I do?

Leaving Miami seems more important than ever. This place is just no good. No matter what I do to try to improve myself when I’m on my own, I find myself being pushed backward when I’m among people. That wouldn’t happen everywhere. The other day, when I was in Orlando (not a city known for the kindness of its residents), I felt that my interactions with people improved me. I was embarrassed when I dealt with them, because it was so obvious to me that they were nicer than I was.

Living here is bad. Belonging here is worse!

It’s interesting to me that generations of academics have chosen morally destructive works to put before their students. Maybe it was inevitable. I suppose that during the Middle Ages, with the limited supply of works to choose from, it would have been hard to justify keeping Homer and Plato out of curricula. Nonetheless, the truth is the truth: academics have a long history of corrupting the young.

I wonder now: should I keep reading this stuff?

Here’s what I have left: Milton, Jane Austen, Dostoevsky, Virginia Woolf, and William Golding. I substituted Golding for Toni Morrison. I read her book a long time ago, and I’m not interested in reading it again. I see her as an overrated affirmative-action pick.

If I quit reading, I’m abandoning a project, and that’s poor discipline. On the other hand…man, this stuff is nasty.

Crime and Punishment is 692 pages. I wish I had not looked that up.

You can make yourself spiritually ill by feeding yourself poison, but you can also feed yourself good things that make you stronger. I could read more nonfiction. Of course, I read the Bible.

I’m grateful for one thing: I’m not sitting here writing about how going back over this material has opened my eyes and shown me that liberal academics and non-Christian (or weak Christian) authors have all the answers. An awful lot of kids come out of college thinking they finally know the truth: God is dead, morality is a destructive fantasy, cynicism is the highest virtue, and so forth. I never felt that way, except maybe about cynicism. Even when I was young and stupid, I had a tiny seed of common sense that told me there were a lot of silly people working at Columbia.

I didn’t swallow all of the Kool-Aid at Columbia, but a whole lot of people have fooled me during my life. I have chosen many toxic influences.

America is very, very sick now. Our culture of cruelty, pride, lust, pleasure, and greed reached critical mass long ago. The chain reaction has been triggered, and we can’t overcome it. I wish I had turned from it sooner. Most people will not turn.

Good news for me, I guess. Bad for other people.

Maybe someone else will read this and realize they, too, have been poisoned.