Putting Deep-State-ism in perspective

One of the most unnerving aspects of polemical discourse is when it's approached on the level of latching onto arcane bits of behavior by public figures in an attempt to point out some supposedly pivotal moment in national history. Players in web-of-intrigue scenarios are reduced to villain and hero stick figures whose nefariousness or nobility can be discerned from some phone calls they made, or emails they sent, or meetings they took.

This is why I have not had much to say about the whole bag of snakes that comprises the Mueller report and subsequent revelations such as Susan Rice's January 17, 2017 email to herself.

If one has to go to such lengths as proclaiming, "Tonight I will show you that this newly unearthed chain of emails is a bombshell the likes of which American history has never seen!," it casts a great deal of doubt on the depth of one's basic convictions about the life of the nation generally.

In other words, let's not get all shook about this, okay?

Look, it doesn't take someone with extraordinary powers of perceptivity to see that Hillary Clinton was a power-mad presidential aspirant for decades, driven by a sort of feminist determination to prove she had at least the chops for the job that her husband, whom she has always disliked intensely, had, as well as more basic motives such as greed and getting a kick out of having as many people under her thumb as possible. She's also always been quite arrogant, which is why she continued to conduct official correspondence on her private server even after she'd become Secretary of State.

It's also obvious that the meeting on the tarmac in Phoenix between Bill Clinton and Loretta Lynch was fishy as hell, especially given the timing.

There's probably a lot in all of it that should send some folks to the hoosegow, but is it really worth tying up the resources of the current iteration of the Justice Department to keep pursuing it all?

Now, the July 5, 2016 presser that Comey gave continues to perplex me. He spent fifteen minutes outlining why the DoJ ought to prosecute Madame Bleachbit, only to wrap things up by recommending that they not.

Comey's perplexing generally. Prior to all this, he'd had a reputation as an uncontroversial straight shooter. He helped prosecute the Gambino crime family. He stood by severely weakened John Ashcroft, who was in an intensive care unit with gall bladder surgery complications and was being pressured to continue the Bush administration's domestic surveillance program. Bush himself was impressed enough by this display of integrity and loyalty to make changes to the program. Comey was a registered Republican until recently.

And then came all the events looked at by the Mueller investigative team.

It's pretty clear that there was a clique within the DoJ / FBI that had it in for Donald Trump once he became the Republican presidential nominee. You don't have to do too deep of a dive to see that Peter Stzrok, Lisa Page and Andrew McCabe thought it would be horrible if Donald Trump became president, and conducted themselves professionally driven by that sentiment. The FISA warrants, the Steele dossier and the role of Fusion GPS - all shady as hell.

Then there's the role of Michael Flynn. Was he set up? A pretty solid case can be made that he was. Of course, the overheated types would chime in with, "Hell, yes, he was! They ruined the life of a distinguished civil servant!"

Now, let us remember that he did tell a falsehood about his Russia contacts, and he was a paid foreign agent of both Turkey and Russia. In the hand-off-the-baton meeting Obama and Trump had in January 2017, Obama advised Trump not to hire Flynn as national security adviser:

Obama’s warning pre-dated the concerns inside the government about Flynn’s contacts with the Russian ambassador, one of the officials said. Obama passed along a general caution that he believed Flynn was not suitable for such a high level post, the official added.

The overall point here is that palace-intrigue scenarios are the wrong places to go looking for answers to the question of whether someone is fit to be us president or not.

My reasons for vehemently opposing Barack Obama did not have much to do with the scandals that arose during his time in office, even the "scandal" Trump calls Obamagate. My problem with Obama, my moniker for whom here at LITD during his time as a figure of central focus was The Most Equal Comrade, was that he'd been a hard-core leftist pretty much all his life. His mentors were the likes of Frank Marshall Davis, Frances Fox Piven, Heather Booth, Greg Galluzzo, Jeremiah Wright, Rashid Khalidi and Bill Ayers. He thought America was fundamentally unfair and needed to be transformed. I'm far more disturbed by the plain old policy-level stuff he was able to get enacted - think the "Affordable" Care act, EPA regulations, the JCPOA - than scandal-type matters.

And my reasons for vehemently opposing Donald Trump are that he is solely motivated by self-glorification. He is a phony. He doesn't care about the Republican Party, much less conservatism. He doesn't have the slightest grasp of the foundational principles of Western civilization. He gives lip service to Christianity for entirely self-serving reasons. He doesn't read anything, from briefing papers to novels to works of philosophy or history. He has no depth. He has a track record of sybaritic abandon that I suspect he's till proud of. He's petty and vindictive. He demands loyalty but does not return it.

So I don't consider this whole re-dredging of the web of shenanigans discussed above a front-burner issue. The existence of a so-called Deep State is not among the five most pressing issues on our nation's plate at the moment.

Don't fixate on the shiny object. Reserve most of your focus for the pandemic, the economic situation, the leftist agenda of the Democrats and Donald Trump's obvious unfitness to be president.