James Comey: Lost in The Kultursmog Jeffrey Lord
The FBI and the “Liberal understanding of events ratified as a matter of morals and etiquette.”
So. The Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation has now told the American people the following, as reported here at Fox News, bold print supplied:
Comey testifies Clinton email claims ‘not true’ at heated Hill hearing
FBI Director James Comey testified Thursday that Hillary Clinton’s claims — some made under oath — about her use of a private email server were “not true,” fueling Republican questions about whether in doing so she committed a felony.
In a wide-ranging appearance before the House oversight committee, Comey also said Clinton’s email practices put America’s secrets at risk and her actions constituted the “definition of carelessness.”
At the same time, Comey staunchly defended the bureau’s decision not to pursue charges. He also said, “We have no basis to conclude that [Clinton] lied to the FBI.”
Yet he acknowledged that lying under oath is a felony, as some Republicans point to statements she made last October before the House Benghazi committee — and plan to request an investigation. At that hearing, Clinton had claimed that nothing she sent or received was marked classified.
The always perceptive Andrew McCarthy, the Comey friend and former Assistant US Attorney for the Southern District of New York and the man who prosecuted the 1993 World Trade Center mastermind the Blind Sheik — had this to say of Comey’s decision over at the Breitbart News Daily SiriusXM to host Stephen K. Bannon:
“I thought the case [Comey] laid out was as bulletproof as it gets. And it seemed to me when he got all the way down the field, he moved the goalposts. So he added elements that the government doesn’t have to prove under the statute as Congress has written it in order to shrink from recommending that charges be brought. To my mind, that’s difficult to square on a lot of levels.”
McCarthy had earlier written this piece at National Review, headlining:
FBI Rewrites Federal Law to Let Hillary Off the Hook
Wrote the seriously accomplished ex-prosecutor of Comey’s work:
There is no way of getting around this: According to Director James Comey (disclosure: a former colleague and longtime friend of mine), Hillary Clinton checked every box required for a felony violation of Section 793(f) of the federal penal code (Title 18): With lawful access to highly classified information she acted with gross negligence in removing and causing it to be removed it from its proper place of custody, and she transmitted it and caused it to be transmitted to others not authorized to have it, in patent violation of her trust. Director Comey even conceded that former Secretary Clinton was “extremely careless” and strongly suggested that her recklessness very likely led to communications (her own and those she corresponded with) being intercepted by foreign intelligence services. Yet, Director Comey recommended against prosecution of the law violations he clearly found on the ground that there was no intent to harm the United States.
Yet, Director Comey recommended against prosecution of the law violations he clearly found on the ground that there was no intent to harm the United States.
In essence, in order to give Mrs. Clinton a pass, the FBI rewrote the statute, inserting an intent element that Congress did not require. The added intent element, moreover, makes no sense: The point of having a statute that criminalizes gross negligence is to underscore that government officials have a special obligation to safeguard national defense secrets; when they fail to carry out that obligation due to gross negligence, they are guilty of serious wrongdoing. The lack of intent to harm our country is irrelevant. People never intend the bad things that happen due to gross negligence.
Thus the obvious question: Why? Why would Comey do this? There is an answer: The Kultursmog. Readers familiar with our esteemed leader at The American Spectator, R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr., will recognize this as one of his countless contributions to the conservative dialogue. Bob writes in his book After the Hangover: The Conservatives’ Road to Recovery this by way of describing his term:
James Piereson, the former executive director of a foundation famous for sustaining the growth of American conservatism, the John M. Olin Foundation, describes Kultursmog as “the Liberal understanding of events ratified as a matter of morals and etiquette” within the media and academe. At another point he summed up Kultursmog as “Liberal prejudices built into the culture as truths.” The Kultursmog is created in two ways: (1) the endless repetition of falsehood and (2) either the complete neglect or the utter misrepresentation of those who do not share Liberalism’s values.
It is a fair guess that James Comey is a daily inhaler of the Kultursmog. The end result being that in the end, there is no way he would put himself out there as the guy who took down a Democratic presidential nominee presumptive — the first woman to be nominated for president no less — because in the world of Kultursmog inhalers such things just aren’t done.
It is surely no accident that Rush Limbaugh has picked up on this as well, although he does not use the term Kultursmog while giving an eerily similar description of it.Here’s Rush on his show from yesterday as he discusses Comey’s decision and compares it to Chief Justice John Roberts’ decision to declare the patently unconstitutional Obamacare as constitutional. Said Rush:
I’ll explain my theory here to you. Admittedly it’s gonna sound simplistic to many of you who think there has to be something deep and dark to explain this. And I think we can explain all of this in three words: race, media, history. Race, media, and history explain this. And what I mean by that is this. There isn’t anyone, there isn’t anyone in government, there isn’t anyone on Capitol Hill, there isn’t anybody in the Drive-By Media who wants to be the person who will be recorded in history and thus always known in history and forever attacked in the media. No one wants to be the one who denied the first African-American president his agenda or his choices.
John Roberts, I think, pretty much said: I’m not gonna sit here and be the guy that presides over a decision here that denies the first Africa — well, the president. He didn’t say first African. — the president such a major, major please of legislation that was duly passed by the elected representatives of the people. He didn’t want to go anywhere near it.
Nobody to this day, after almost seven and a half years, nobody lifts a finger to stop Barack Obama. Nobody lifts a finger to deny Barack Obama. Nobody lifts a finger to oppose Obama on the serious agenda items that are transforming this nation and are resulting in the implementation of his real agenda. I don’t think James Comey wanted to be the guy noted forever in history and attacked as such. I don’t think Comey wanted to be the guy known for torpedoing the candidacy of the first woman nominated by her party to seek the presidency of the United States. So race, slash, gender, media, history.
Notice the similarity here? When Rush says the factors in the Comey decision on prosecuting Hillary and the Roberts decision on giving a pass to Obamacare are “race, slash, gender, media, history” he is saying more or less what Tyrrell’s “Kultursmog” is precisely about when Tyrrell uses Piereson’s description of the Kultursmog being “the Liberal understanding of events ratified as a matter of morals and etiquette.”
Thus understood, this is why Hillary Clinton skates and, say, Edward Snowden — he of another security violation — is a wanted man who was so terrified of the consequences of his actions that he flees to the likes of Putin’s Russia for his own safety. In fact, Snowden himself has tweeted this out:
Break classification rules for the public’s benefit, and you could be exiled.
Do it for personal benefit, and you could be President.
Snowden’s problem, it seems, is that he doesn’t inhale the Kultursmog.
Alas, the Director of the FBI apparently does.
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