Swamp logic ...

The Swamp creatures in DC thrive on “technicalities.”  It’s their go-to excuse for avoiding punishment for doing something clearly wrong by almost anyone else’s standards.  “Well, it might look bad but it’s not technically illegal … ” How many times have we heard that?

It’s lawyerly crap.  It’s also all too common in Washington. Which shouldn’t surprise anyone since most people there are lawyers.  And weasels.  On both sides of the aisle. 

How does someone making $140K a year suddenly become a millionaire while they are in Congress? How do their children and spouses also become millionaires at the same time? How do spouses and offspring of officials get rich while a family member has a government job?  

Oh no, nothing to see here. 

The common defense is that whatever happened wasn’t technically illegal.  That’s rich. Congress exempts itself from a whole lot of rules that would land anyone else behind bars. Like insider trading.  So while the SEC would haul in Martha Stewart – and send her to prison – for using an insider tip to save money, those in Congress do the same thing all the time. 

Want to know how someone in Congress gets rich making $140K a year, while also maintaining two residences?  It’s easy. They trade on information not available to people outside of Congress. They put in earmarks for roads and other infrastructure projects that will dramatically increase the value of real estate they own.  They buy up stocks based on closed-door budget briefings, and short stocks of companies when they know funding to them is going to get cut. 

Here’s the really slick part to cover their tracks: they often swap earmarks with someone outside their own district in return for putting in earmarks in that other politician’s district. 

For example, why else would someone representing Nevada sneak in Federal funding for a road to nowhere in another state? Generosity?  Statesmanship? I don’t think so, especially when that road to nowhere suddenly and dramatically increases the value of land owned by that other state’s Congressman and his or her business partners.

Then the favor is returned, by sneaking in funding for a pet project of the Nevada Congressman, which will also substantially enrich the Nevada rep and his or her partners.

This happens all the time. How do you think a lightweight like Harry Reid got so rich? How do you think all those middle-income folks who entered Congress left as millionaires?       

But do you think anyone in Congress is going to do anything about self-dealing and using their positions to enrich themselves? Of course not. 

Then there are their offspring.

That’s another way to trade on their position to land plum jobs for their children.

Does anyone really think Hunter Biden got his job at a corrupt entity like Burisma, paying $83K a month, because of his experience in energy in Ukraine? 

He’s just the tip of the iceberg. 

Hunter Biden was in a partnership with John Kerry’s stepson, Chris Heinz, in something called Rosemont Capital – an arm of the Heinz family foundation, prior to Hunter taking the seat at Burisma. Chris Heinz was also a partner with Devon Archer, Heinz’ college roommate and friend of John Kerry, in Rosemont Seneca Partners, a private equity firm – another Heinz foundation entity.  Archer took a seat on the Burisma board right before Hunter did.

To bring this all full circle, Rosemont Seneca was the private equity firm that got a $1.5 billion commitment out of nowhere from the Chinese following a trip Hunter took with Joe on Air Force 2 to China. Coincidence?  

Let’s see: Biden, Kerry, Heinz – do those names sound familiar? 

How about Clinton?  Let’s just discuss Hillary and Chelsea.

As First Lady of Arkansas Hillary engaged in a series of unusual commodity-futures trades – with no prior trading experience – that that turned her initial $1K investment into $100K.  Just lucky, I suppose, right? Well, one analysis by Auburn University put the odds of what she accomplished as 1 in 31 trillion. 

Was it illegal? Like most things with the Clintons we’ll never know. There was never an official government investigation.  

Everyone does know why Hillary and Bill later set up the William J. Clinton Foundation that took in hundreds of millions, however.  It was for the money and to employ Clinton supporters.  Most of that money poured in while Hillary was a Senator, Secretary of State and when she was running for President, and a lot of it came from big multinational corporations.

A lot also came from countries with atrocious human rights records.  Like Saudi Arabia. Qatar. Oman.  And corrupt players like Ukrainian and other Eastern European oligarchs.  She was Secretary of State.  You figure it out. 

Then she ran for President and more came in, along with huge speaking fees for her and Bill, like $500K for a speech Bill made in Russia. 

But donations and speaking fees for Hillary and Bill dropped dramatically after Hillary lost her bid for the Oval Office. Coincidence? 

Their daughter Chelsea – who exudes all the personality of an avocado – got an on-air job at NBC in 2011 paying $600K a year. Also in 2011, she got a seat on the board of IAC/Interactive, a company run by Barry Diller (a Clinton supporter) that paid her $50K and granted her $250K worth of restricted stock. For what?  

This is how the Swamp really works.  People sell their positions and names for money. They routinely trade on insider information. They use Federal funding to support often ludicrous projects that will enrich themselves and their friends.  They secure ridiculously lavish jobs for their offspring with no discernible skills. They know outside entities are giving cushy jobs to their kids and contributing to their campaigns for only one reason: to buy influence and access.

Yet using Swamp logic, they haven’t done anything wrong.  At least technically. 

As Joe Biden said of his son’s ability to secure an $83K per month board seat on Burisma and get a $1.5 billion commitment from the Chinese for Hunter’s private equity firm both while Joe was VP, none of this was illegal.  Technically, perhaps not. Ethically is an entirely different matter.

Wrong? Absolutely.    

And both Bill and Hillary maintain to this day that contributions to the Clinton Foundation and big speaking fees had absolutely no influence on Hillary’s decisions as Secretary of State or her role on the CFIUS group that approved the controversial Uranium One deal.  But shortly after the deal went through, investors in Uranium One contributed millions to the Clinton Foundation.

Just another coincidence, I suppose. 

If you want to really understand quid pro quo, look no further than the Swamp in DC.  It’s the coin of the realm for politicians and bureaucrats who dwell in the Swamp. 

Everything there is a transaction.  And sometimes those transactions are just plain wrong. Sometimes wildly unethical.  Yet rarely called out as such. 

You can thank Swamp logic which always protects its own.   

Why yes, the Democrats are crazy ...

It’s not your imagination.  What you’re seeing is what you think you’re seeing. 

They are clearly insane. Nuts. Bonkers. Off the deep end. Especially most of those trying to get the Democrat nomination to run against Trump in 2020.   

Worse yet, many of their supporters don’t seem to realize it.  Some of them might but it doesn’t seem to bother them all that much.  Maybe they agree with them.  That’s truly scary.   

Some candidates running for the Democrat nomination must think it’s a great way to get attention and keep their names out there. They’ll clearly do or say anything – and I do mean anything – to stay in the spotlight, no matter how nuts.   

Like saying that if gun owners resist a government buyback program for their legally purchased AR-15s and AK-47s, the government will just confiscate their weapons and arrest them. 

Like saying that illegal immigrants are actually “heroes” and should not be prosecuted for illegally crossing our borders; in fact, our borders are immoral and should be removed. 

Like saying that violent criminal illegal aliens should not be handed over to ICE for deportation.  

Like saying detention facilities at our border are just like Nazi concentration camps.  

Like saying all illegal immigrants should be provided with free healthcare and full welfare benefits at U.S. taxpayer expense. 

Like saying that all private insurance – including employer-provided and through union contracts, which together cover more than 150 million Americans – should be eliminated and replaced with a government-run single-payer system paid for by higher taxes on everyone.

Like saying that people still in prison – even those who’ve committed the worst crimes, like terror bombings, rape, child molestation, and murder – should be allowed to vote in our elections. 

Like saying we should simply abolish prisons in America.

Like saying that any church that opposes gay marriage should be stripped of its tax exemption.

Like saying that all student debt – even debt incurred at expensive elite Ivy-League schools by students of wealthy parents – should be forgiven.  

Like saying that all public colleges should be free, even for illegal immigrants, with the cost paid by higher taxes on the middle and upper class. 

Like saying it should be illegal to become a billionaire.   

I don’t think these candidates grasp that anything they say publicly in this digital age is out there forever. Maybe they’re counting on their pals in the media to bury anything damaging to them. However, it’s a sure bet that dumb statements can and will come back to haunt them.

The digital age can cut both ways, and deeply.  Count on it. 

Things candidates are saying to win over the Dem’s radical left base in the primaries are becoming increasingly crazy. 

These may give a woody to the woke but that’s about it.

Once most Americans start paying attention to what the Democrat candidates are actually promising to do, I don’t think it’s going to go over very well. And you can bet your bottom dollar in 2020 Republicans will remind everybody what those candidates said, using their own words against them.  

It won’t just be attack ads against individual Democrats running for President or House and Senate seats, but against the entire Democrat party and anybody with a D behind their name – whether at the Federal, state or local level.

All Republicans have to do it push the playback button. Just roll the tape … 

The pitch will be simple: The Democrat Party has gone insane.  And despite what individual Democrats say when they are running for office about really being moderate and willing to work across the aisle to solve real problems, you simply can’t trust them. Once they get elected, they follow their leaders like Pelosi and Schumer and proven liars like Schiff and Nadler and forget about you. They are all amoral weasels who will do or say anything to get and hold on to power.  

Case in point: the shameful Kavanaugh hearings. Lies about “evidence,” hiding new accusations until after the hearings were to be officially closed, demanding additional FBI investigations that, as expected showed that key witnesses against Kavanaugh lied.  Need I say more? 

Case in point:  the fiasco over the Mueller Report which, after so much hype and hyperbole, turned out to be a waste of time and more than $30 million to prove Trump never colluded with Russia. Which is what he said all along.  Well, what about the “obstruction” narrative?  Think about this: how could he have obstructed the probe when he voluntarily turned over millions of documents and told his people to cooperate with investigators, which they all did? 

Case in point: after two years holding the House, what have Democrats accomplished?  Instead of working to solve immigration, infrastructure, and make lives better for Americans, Democrats have spent that time and millions trying to overturn the 2016 election – for what? There’s another election in 13 months. Why not let voters decide? Why? Because they don’t trust the voters.    

Case in point: the dust up over the Ukraine phone call.  Democrats and their friends in the media have lied about this at practically every step. They even brought out an anonymous whistleblower who wasn’t even there for the call claiming Trump threatened the president of Ukraine multiple times with withholding military aid unless Ukraine investigated the Bidens and turned over a server the DNC had containing Hillary’s e-mails from 2016.  

Then, surprise, Trump does the unthinkable and releases the actual transcript for everyone to read.  And there’s no quid pro quo; not even one, much less seven as claimed by the whistleblower.  No threats. No pressure on the Ukrainian president, according the transcript and even by the Ukrainian president himself. Yet the Democrats start an impeachment inquiry based on – what? 

The Democrats’ insanity is not something new.  But the more they all blather on with crazier and crazier stuff, the more they can expect to see their lunacy played back verbatim in Republican commercials for the 2020 election.

Trump and the Republicans should thank them.  

It’s such great material to work with.    

Trump is right about pulling U.S. troops from Syria ...

Right now, the DC establishment on both sides of the aisle is going nuts about Trump pulling U.S. troops out of Syria.

The media are reporting Pentagon officials and Defense Department types are shocked and stunned by his decision. Blindsided.  The media are also reporting our allies are questioning whether Trump can be trusted to defend them and our strategic partners. 

Everybody in DC is horrified. 

Me, not so much. I don’t always agree with Trump. But this time he’s right.  We need to get out of pointless and seemingly endless wars. Leaving Syria is a good start. 

What about the Kurds? Haven’t they been loyal partners with us in fighting ISIS?  And now we’re simply going to abandon them to be slaughtered by the Turks?

I’ll get to that in a minute. 

First, here’s what all those outraged people forget.  You can’t trust anyone in the Middle East.  No one. Not the Syrians. Not the Kurds. Not the Iraqis. Not the Afghanis. Not the Qataris. Not the Iranians.  Not the Turks.  And especially not the Saudis. 

For that matter, not the Israelis, either. 

We’ve wasted trillions of dollars and thousands of U.S. lives trying to push a rope.  We have absolutely nothing to show for all that. The Middle East is still a corrupt cesspool of oppressive, murderous regimes. Various factions will continue to kill each other, and us if we stay there, no matter what we do. And they'll continue to hate us.  

Our “allies” there will also shift sides whenever it suits them. One day we are arming them to the teeth to fight our enemies du jour. But if they get a better offer, they’ll turn on us using the weapons we gave them. It happens to us all the time.

And we never seem to learn.  

We armed the mujahidin under Osama Bin Laden to drive the Russians from Afghanistan. Al Qaeda sprang from that and we know how well that turned out.  911 ring a bell?

We unwisely invaded Afghanistan 18 years ago to destroy the same Al Qaeda and stop the Taliban, solidifying hatred of American “invaders” across the Middle East. We supported one corrupt, inept Afghan government after another, built up and armed their army – which in turn ran and abandoned those weapons, trucks and tanks to ISIS time and time again. Some of the defectors from the Afghan army joined ISIS and used the uniforms we gave them to get into our bases and kill American soldiers. 

We invaded Iraq to take out Hussein and his nonexistent ties to Al Qaeda and his equally nonexistent stockpiles of WMD our intelligence agencies wrongly convinced us were there. We conveniently overlooked that Hussein’s Iraq was the only country keeping Iran in check.  Iraq’s still a hellhole and the militias we armed to help us “pacify” Iraq now work for Iran – who sponsors terror groups in Iraq and around the world and still kills our soldiers in Iraq.    

In Syria, we armed the Kurds to fight ISIS, which they did. In truth, we probably couldn’t have beat back ISIS without them. But the Kurds didn’t do it for us; they did it to secure territory in Syria for the Kurdistan they’ve always sought.  That was their motivation.   

But there’s more. There always is. 

To gain their sovereign, independent Kurdistan, the Kurds have been engaged in a terror campaign of indiscriminate bombings and shootings in Turkey for over 30 years. This landed the PKK, the Kurd’s avowed Maoist political arm, on the U.S. list of terror organizations.

The Kurds want to take over a part of Turkey for a Kurd nation. The Kurd holdings in Syria along the Turkish border would be part of that.  It would also give them proximity to launch even more terror attacks on Turkey.  The Turks, not surprisingly, are not eager to let that happen, which is why Turkey is now attacking the Kurds to drive them out of that Syrian enclave. 

Frankly, the Kurds don’t care who helps them get their Kurdistan; they’ll flip in a heartbeat. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Kurds go over to the Russia-backed Assad regime. They have more in common with the Russians and Assad than they ever did with us. 

Before we forget, let's not overlook that our other "loyal" ally in the Middle East, Saudi Arabia, helped the 911 hijackers kill over 3,000 innocent Americans.  Then, they had our government help them extricate the families of those who committed this atrocity before they could be arrested here. We blamed Al Qaeda for the attack and let the Saudis off the hook.  

But the Saudis actually inspired Al Qaeda though their promotion of Wahhabi beliefs. They operate religious missions around the world preaching this radical version of Islam that approves of murdering infidels – basically anybody who doesn’t believe exactly what they do, including Jews, Christians, and yes, even other Muslims. If anyone wants to know the underpinnings of Al Qaeda and its murderous actions, look to madrasas run by Saudi Arabia.   

Finally, our buddies the Saudis recently dispatched a hit squad to Turkey to murder a problematic journalist, chop up his body, and ship the parts back, all at the request of the new, more "moderate" Saudi Crown Prince. 

Here’s the overarching lesson that continues to escape us: there are no good guys in the Middle East.  There’s absolutely nobody there we could ever trust.  They’ll never change.   

Why are we there at all?

Good question.   

The DC establishment – again, both Republicans and Democrats – wants us to continue to pour money and lives down what is a proven, bottomless rat hole. Apparently, the Pentagon and Defense Department types agree wholeheartedly. The case is often made that if we don’t exert influence in the region someone else – Russia or maybe China – will.

There are also the desires of what President Eisenhower famously warned of – our military-industrial complex. Conflict and deployments mean more money for weapons they can sell to our government and governments overseas.  Representatives and Senators want the jobs those weapons industries bring to their districts and states, and the campaign money lobbyists for those industries provide.   

Of course, the Afghan and Iraqi governments, more of our "loyal" allies, don’t want us to pull out because they are almost wholly dependent on our military spending and aid programs to prop up their corrupt regimes. They may hate us but they love our money.  

But the biggest publicly stated rationale is that Russia or China will move in if we leave.   

To which I say: let them.   

Let them get mired in endless wars. Let them spend trillions of their own, and thousands of lives for absolutely nothing in return. 

We can sit back and watch them repeat the errors of the past.  Which they surely will. 

Because they won’t find anyone in the Middle East who won’t stab them in the back at the first opportunity. That’s been our experience.  It’s their turn. 

As much as everyone in the Middle East hates each other, they hate foreigners even more.

It makes no difference whether those foreigners are us, Russia, China or anybody else.    

Chasing down the wrong rabbit hole ...

Trump and his Republican allies are wasting their time trying to prove Biden was corrupt.

Everyone knows he has been and still is. Everyone. 

His nitwit son with no discernable relevant job skills got a board seat paying him $50K a month with a corrupt Ukrainian gas company while Joe was VP in charge of the Ukraine.  Then the same son flies on Air Force II with daddy to China and gets a $1.5B private equity deal with China shortly after. 

Later, Biden goes out on video bragging about how he leveraged a billion in aid to Ukraine to get a key prosecutor fired who was about to interview his son Hunter about corruption in the same Ukrainian gas company – which, BTW, was owned by a Russian oligarch. 

Here’s the problem:  Trump and the Republicans are trying to prove there was a reason why they wanted Ukraine to investigate the Bidens. They don’t have to.  Trump had every right to ask, regardless.  Meanwhile the Democrats are saying asking a foreign country (Ukraine) to help U.S. investigators was all a plot to damage Trump’s most likely opponent – Joe Biden.

But Biden was never going to be Trump’s Democrat opponent. He didn’t have a prayer of getting the nomination because he’s an idiot, too moderate, and has too much baggage from the Obama years. There’s a reason Obama tried to persuade him not to run. 

Let me put it another way. It’s like pass interference in football: there’s no pass interference if the ball was obviously uncatchable.

Trump couldn’t damage a political opponent who wasn’t ever going to win the Democrat nomination in the first place.  Everybody but Biden, perhaps, knew he didn’t have a chance. 

Trump didn’t go after Biden because he feared him, but because Biden and his family are crooks. Biden’s son used his father’s position to cash in, as did Joe’s brother, just as Hillary used her position to enrich herself and her family when she was Secretary of State. 

That’s demonstrable corruption. 

However, Republicans are missing the bigger issue as they tumble down the Biden rabbit hole. They should be concentrating on corruption in our own intel agencies and forget about Biden.

If people in the CIA, FBI and NSA are trying to take down a lawfully elected President, that should give every American the heebie jeebies. If we can’t trust them to be impartial, we’re all screwed.  

The Senate should be investigating the FBI, CIA, and NSA, much the way these agencies were investigated years ago when they were found to be operating way outside the law.

For reference look up Church Committee Hearings in the 1970s.  It was a Democrat Senator, Frank Church, who headed up the Senate’s investigations.

Here’s what the Church Committee found:

The CIA was participating in assassinations and engineering coups of democratically elected foreign leaders like Allende in Chile, along with developing plots to kill other leaders around the world, such as Patrice Lumumba and Fidel Castro.  The FBI used spies and illegal wiretaps to build files on civil-rights leaders like MLK and others, journalists, and potentially to blackmail anyone giving them trouble. The FBI and NSA were snooping on ordinary Americans even then – listening into phone calls as well as opening and copying U.S. mail, all without warrants.     

The agencies acted as if they were above the law and accountable only to themselves. In essence, they felt they could get away with anything – even murder. 

At the time Church was quoted as saying: “I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return."

One of the outcomes was the creation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (FISA), which required special judges within newly created FISA Courts to approve surveillance by domestic intel agencies of foreign powers suspected of espionage or terrorism. 

Congress had to act to expose our intel community’s arrogance and dirty dealings. It took aggressive Senate investigations to clean house and put an end to all that.

                                                

Temporarily, it appears.  Now the same intel agencies are back to their old dirty tricks. 

If the Mueller probe proved anything, it was that key players in our intel community decided it was their right to use all their powers to interfere in a Presidential election to favor their preferred candidate.  And then, when that failed, try to unseat an elected President they didn’t like.  Not because he did anything wrong, but simply because he might upset their hold on power.

The evidence of their illicit and unconstitutional activities is in plain sight.

Think about Comey’s actions to illegally pass on FBI memos to the media. 

Think of how the FBI repeatedly used false information from Russians – that the FBI knew was false – to deceive a FISA Court and spy on Trump and his campaign. 

Think of how our intel community outsourced spying to foreign intel operations to skirt our laws against spying on U.S. citizens.

Think about leaks to the media of private White House conversations with world leaders. 

Think about the latest whistleblower complaint from someone who described himself or herself as a CIA operative assigned to the White House.    

Back in the days of Senators Frank Church and Sam Ervin, Democrats would be leading the charge to investigate abuse in our intel community with all this evidence. 

But not now. That’s why the Republicans in the Senate need to do it. That’s why the upcoming reports from Barr, Durham, and the IG about these alleged abuses are so important.

And that’s why Democrats and players in our intel community are fighting tooth and nail to destroy Trump and Barr, now. As quickly as possible.  They know what’s likely to come out. 

The obvious:  our intel community has been corrupted. It can’t be trusted.  As in the days that led to the Church Committee hearings, our intel community again believes it has the power to do anything it wants, even if that means ousting a democratically elected President.

Someone needs to rein them in. They need to be thoroughly investigated.  And then purged of the bad actors who have created this mess. 

Frank Church was right to warn us what could happen if we don’t.  Tyranny. And an abyss from which we cannot return.       

That’s where the real story is for Trump and the Republicans; not a washed-up fossil like Biden who never had a chance, anyway.