The Aftermath, Part 3

Given the nature of the Republican Party (with a few notable exceptions), almost anyone else would have acquiesced to the demands to concede the race in the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election, despite mounting evidence that were irregularities and potential fraud that may have been perpetrated on the American people. Donald Trump isn’t just anyone. Like him, love him, loathe him, or just flat out don’t give a rat’s butt about him, he is doing this republic and its democratic processes a big favor by not going quietly into that good night. Win, lose, or draw, there needs to be an accounting for what happened in these battleground states in the run-up to the election, election day itself, and the aftermath we are currently living through.

 

As the number of witnesses and whistleblowers who have signed affidavits attesting to what they saw or were directed to do continues to grow, it becomes very difficult to dismiss these individuals as liars, shills, or Republican operatives with sinister motives. If the Democrats and others truly believe that Mr. Biden is the clear winner in these contests, then it shouldn’t be that much of an inconvenience to let the process play itself out. The American people deserve nothing less.

 

Right now, I’d like to take a break and play a little guessing game. I’m thinking of a prime number from one to forty. See if you can guess what it is. For those who have forgotten what a prime number is, it’s a number whose result can only be achieved by multiplying itself and one. Examples of this are 1, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19, 23, etc. This will factor into the discussion later.

 

Anyhow, back to where I left off. If one looks at the transition team and picks for Mr. Biden’s cabinet, one thing stands out plain as day. Jake and Elwood are trying to get the band back together again. We are seeing the same old faces being recycled through the swamp in different positions and capacities. To paraphrase the Who “meet the new boss, same as the old boss”.  If this truly is the case, how well will that sit with the more radical elements of the Democrat Party? Will they be accepting of this, or will they try and exert a greater role in crafting national policy either through the legislative process or via executive branch agencies (i.e. political appointments as payback)?

 

In part one of this series of posts, I alluded to what the Republicans had failed to do during and after the Mueller Probe, but there’s actually a personal side to all of this. Allow me to elaborate. Back in September of 2018 (September 11^th, ironically), my congressman was a guest speaker at a meeting of our local neighborhood association. Among the things he discussed was impeaching the president. I already knew that he sat on the Permanent Select Committee for Intelligence in the House, but unbeknownst to all in attendance at the time, his committee had already held hearings where individuals testified to there being no collusion between the Trump Campaign and the Russians. There are three individuals whose testimonies stand out for a couple of reasons: their centrality to the narrative being pushed by the Democrats and the media and the presence of my congressman during two of these sessions. Once Rick Grenell, the Acting DNI at the time, declassified these transcripts, I decided to download them from the committee’s minority webpage.

 

General James Clapper. General Clapper had been the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) during the Obama Administration. He was, in effect, the nation’s spymaster. During his testimony, he stated that there had been no collusion the intelligence agencies could ascertain that had taken place between the Trump Campaign and the Russians. The only crumbs that he could offer up to his questioners was the assumption that the Russians had preferred Mr. Trump over Mrs. Clinton in the 2016 election. We all know what they say about assumptions. To assume makes an “ass” out of “u” and “me”. But yet we had an individual in charge of the entire hodgepodge of our alphabet soup agencies, a retired general, no less, doing just that! My congressman wasn’t present for this session, but two names most of us would recognize were there. Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell.

 

Rob Goldstone. Mr. Goldstone was a British music promoter with ties to a wealthy family considered Russia’s answer to the Trumps. He was also the architect of the Trump Tower meeting that ruffled the feathers of so many on Capitol Hill and the legacy media. During his testimony, Mr. Goldstone admitted that he had embellished the importance of setting up this meeting with Don Jr, Jared Kushner, and other principals in the campaign. In fact, with one exception, he knew nothing about who the participants on the Russian side were going to be. He had done this as a favor for one of his clients. To make a long story a bit shorter, the meeting turned into a discussion about the adoption of Russian children, which was an indirect overture at doing away with the Magnitsky Act. The act placed sanctions on various Russian individuals and organizations, in the wake of the mysterious death of a Russian lawyer named Sergei Magnitsky. The whole episode had been a case of bait and switch, which was most likely why the Mueller team never went after anyone involved in this meeting.

 

Shawn Henry. Mr. Henry is the President of CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity firm. Some of you may have seen their commercials on television. This company was hired by the Democratic National Committee (DNC) to provide a variety of services, including detecting intruders on their servers and a forensic audit of those same servers in the wake of claims that the servers had been hacked by Russian affiliated organizations. We were told that the information stolen off of these systems eventually made its way into the hands of Julian Assange of WikiLeaks. Mr. Assange claimed then, and still does to this very day, that the information was given to him by an individual with no ties to any governmental organization. In fact, the FBI had offered a deal of limited immunity to Mr. Assange if he were to divulge the source of the DNC information, as well as turning over the trove of documents he had yet to release in future document dumps. One individual put the kibosh on all of this. Then Director of the FBI, James Comey.

 

Anyway, back to Mr. Henry and CrowdStrike. Under oath, he had to admit that they suspected the intruders on the DNC systems may have been a Russian hacking group with ties to Russian military intelligence (GRU). Mr. Henry stated that his organization could not provide conclusive evidence that this group had stolen any of the DNC information that made its way to WikiLeaks. They could only surmise that the data may have been exfiltrated from the servers. No government agency, the FBI included, was ever given access to these systems to perform their own examinations. Again, it all comes down to assumptions, speculation, and conjecture, but this is what had been passed on to the masses as the gospel truth.

 

All of these hearings occurred between the spring of 2017 and July of 2018. This means that there was a two-month gap between the conclusion of these hearings and the time my congressman came to speak to our association. In the wake of all that has transpired, it has become patently obvious that he intentionally misled everyone in attendance at that September meeting. Is it any wonder why Congress only has an approval rating in the high single to low double digits?

 

And now, it’s time to reveal the answer to the question about the number I was thinking of. It was 37. That’s the number of days it took to call Florida in the 2000 election. Mind you, that was just one state and we have a handful of states where election irregularities continue to pop up, the closer we get to the dates that these states need to certify their results. As stated earlier, win, lose, or draw, the president and his allies are doing what is necessary to ensure that the integrity of our election processes remains intact. It has been said that eternal vigilance is the price of security. Given the times we live in, that statement never rang truer.

 

The Aftermath, Part 2

 So, riddle me this Batman. If one truly believed in the rule of law, then why try and use the power of the government against one’s political adversaries? Why ignore agency and departmental norms, policies, and procedures? Why violate federal laws? Why violate the civil rights of one’s fellow citizens guaranteed under the Constitution? Why try and cover up all of what occurred, despite the fact that those responsible for such egregious conduct were the ones advocating for the truth, the facts, justice, candor and transparency?

If one truly believed in the sanctity of the electoral process, then why not ensure that the process itself, or some aspect thereof, hasn’t been compromised or corrupted? Why not “pull back the curtain”, as it were, to reveal all of the goings on? Why shroud or obfuscate this process, if doing so only served to make many suspicious of the process itself?  Why act in haste when it comes to deciding the outcome of a political contest if one of the parties would like to have the process validated prior to the race being called? Why dismiss those concerns as nothing more than “sour grapes” instead of letting the process play itself out?

Here’s why. The parties involved in appealing to our higher moral sensibilities and better angels really aren’t interested in holding themselves to those same high standards they expect others to follow. Expecting others to play fair in the sandbox is nothing more than a pretense to be used to take advantage of others. The louder the calls for impartiality, fairness, objectivity, and candor, from these individuals, while dismissing similar requests from others, the more likely it is that they’re up to no good.

The Aftermath, Part 1

 AOC and Jennifer Rubin may be in separate parties, but both think that Trump supporters and administration officials need to be punished just for being who they are. These individuals are not on the fringes of political thinking, regardless of what some may think.

 

Ms. Rubin and others, including Nicole Wallace of MSNBC, Anna Navarro, formerly of CNN and now at The View on ABC, and the brain trust at the Lincoln Project, are all Bush acolytes, and by default represent the Republican establishment. This is the same establishment that held the House and Senate during the first two years of the Trump presidency. The committees their party chaired (Intel in the Senate, Intel and Judiciary/Oversight in the House) held meetings designed to get to the bottom of the Steele Dossier, Russian Interference and possible collusion with the Trump campaign in the 2016 election. The individuals who were interviewed by, or testified before these committees, indicated beyond a shadow of a doubt that there was “no there there”.  Yet we saw no efforts to dismantle the narrative about said collusion or to bring a halt to the Mueller witch hunt. These are the same folks who, mind you, sent our military members off to fight and be killed or maimed in endless foreign wars, shipped our good-paying manufacturing jobs overseas, and helped to decimate the American middle class.

 

With Trump possibly on his way out, they now want back in and are willing to do away with whatever remnants there may be of any “Orange Man Bad” influences in the DC establishment, at the earliest available opportunity. They’re hoping that they can get back to business as usual and that this whole episode will be nothing more than a historical aberration. Apparently, they are unwilling to take a cue as to what the American people had to say about the direction that this country was headed in pre-COVID/George Floyd. They saw the virus and unrest as a way to repudiate the president and his followers. It was nothing more than an opportunity for them to weasel their way back into power. Problem is, they may have done more harm to Republican party unity because of their hatred of this president. They were the ones who handed Joe Biden an electoral victory, not the legacy media, not the tech oligarchs or their obviously biased social media platforms, not jaundiced celebrities, or even the president’s off-the-wall tweets.

 

AOC and the Squad are the vanguard of a political group known as the Justice Democrats. They call themselves a party within a party. They are the ultra-progressive left given form. Up until the racial unrest in this country, their candidates running in Democrat primaries had been getting soundly trounced by more moderate opponents. In the aftermath of the protests, these candidates started to meet with overwhelming success in their respective primary contests. The woke left was making even greater inroads into the Democrat party. Conversely, the supposed moderates, who were elected in a blue wave in 2018, saw their numbers decline in this election at the hands of Republican challengers, leaving the more radical elements of the party relatively intact. They now hold an unusual amount of sway within the party. An incredible feat for a group of backbenchers. One doesn’t have to wonder for very long how this was all possible. The under 40 voter demographic in this country is at the leading edge of a political revolution that had our public schools, colleges, and universities as its incubators. A revolution, that if ever given an opportunity to gain a head of steam, would irrevocably change the very fabric of this country at a political, economic, and societal level.

 

So, the idea that these folks are on the fringes of mainstream political thought, is wishful thinking, at best, or willful ignorance/denial, at worst.