RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://dianawest.net/Home/tabid/36/EntryId/3776/Who-What-When-Where-Woodward.aspx

I, myself, had one unlikely brush with Bob Woodward. It happened in the early spring of 2013, when, while squiring my Danish friend and then-editor Lars Hedegaard around town on a visit of his to D.C., I found myself sitting across a Washington dinner table from Woodward.

Recently, Lars had miraculously survived an assassination attempt outside his home in a suburb of Copenhagen and was enjoying, if that’s the word, an intense burst of interest in his affairs in new quarters. In some cases, I couldn’t decide whether the interest was genuine or rubber-necking.

The dinner Lars was invited to was at Michael and Barbara Ledeen’s house. I had met Michael before but did not know the other guests, and was simply there as Lars’ companion. When the party had assembled, it included, besides the Ledeens, Lars and me, a daughter of the Ledeen’s (the one who worked with or would work with Gen. Flynn in Afghanistan, I am guessing), Richard Perle, Ron and Allis Radosh (I know, I know), and Bob Woodward.

There was something surreal about suddenly and unexpectedly being within pass-the-butter range of Historic Media Figure Woodward, which I tried to express in a syndicated column I wrote after the evening. It was Lars’ night — he also wanted to raise the profile of his newspaper, Dispatch International — but as concern with his personal near-death experience did not seem to extend too deeply into the Islamic war for Europe, abetted by European elites (and covered by Dispatch International), the conservation soon flowed back into channels familiar from any “media roundtable.”

But I wanted to ask a question or two that never make it onto the networks or cable. For starters, I really wanted to ask Woodward the Nixon-Slayer about Obama’s problematic (read: fraudlulent) identity docs. Had the Intrepid One ever actually examined them for himself?

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/09/trump-russia-probe-fbi-fisa-application/Unseal the FISA redactions? We should be alarmed by what’s already disclosed

Will this be the week? With bated breath, we wait to find out whether we’ve reached the moment, after the Labor Day end of summer, just as the critical midterm races heat up, when President Trump will follow through on his threat to declassify and publicize key FISA-gate documents — in particular, the redacted portions of the Carter Page surveillance-warrant applications.

I hope the president follows through, at least to the extent he can do so without putting intelligence methods and sources at risk. Accountability is essential here.

The FBI and the Obama Justice Department launched an investigation of the Democrats’ political adversaries, and they used Clinton-campaign-generated, foreign-provided innuendo to do it. They strained to make a case on Donald Trump even as they were burying a daunting criminal case on Mrs. Clinton. As I have previously explained, moreover, the president was misled about his status: not only was he a suspect in the investigation, he was the main suspect.

The main suspect in an investigation with no crime.

Before we unwind that, let’s dispense with the tired claim that the Obama administration did not really spy on Trump and his campaign. Every one of the four FISA warrant applications, after describing Russia’s cyberespionage attack on the 2016 election, makes the following assertion (after two redacted lines):

the FBI believes that the Russian Government’s efforts to influence the 2016 election were being coordinated with Page and perhaps other individuals associated with Candidate #1’s campaign.

“Candidate #1” is Trump. See, the upper hierarchies of the FBI and the Justice Department believed the Steele dossier — or at least they said they did. The operating assumption of the Obama administration in the months before the 2016 election was that the Trump campaign was complicit in the Kremlin’s hacking conspiracy. Otherwise, the FBI would not have made this representation to the FISA court four times, including twice after President Trump was already in office.

Did they say this because they believed it was true? Because they wanted to believe it was true? Because they had misplaced confidence in Christopher Steele, the former British spy who shared their anti-Trump contempt? Probably a bit of all those things. But the point is: You must always bear in mind that the incumbent leadership of the intelligence community had convinced itself that the Trump campaign was in cahoots with the Kremlin. Based on that belief, the FBI and Obama’s DOJ took bold risks because they’d further convinced themselves that there was no risk at all: Everything was in the black box of classified intelligence and, besides, Hillary was a shoo-in to win. No one would ever be any the wiser.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-dirt-and-delay-playbook-1536966589

A reliable rule of modern politics, especially Supreme Court politics, is to think lower. Really low. That’s our advice as we learn more about the last-minute accusation that Democrats are floating against Brett Kavanaugh. The timeline of this ugly disclosure suggests it’s part of a calculated if desperate strategy to delay a confirmation vote past the November election.

The New Yorker on Friday offered more details on the accusation from a woman who claims Mr. Kavanaugh had “attempted to force himself on her” at a party when the two were in high school in the early 1980s. Yes, high school. The story was published a day after Senator Dianne Feinstein, ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, announced that she had “information” about Mr. Kavanaugh that she had shared with the FBI.

Ms. Feinstein purported to take the high road of offering no details and protecting the woman’s privacy. But someone took the low road of providing the New Yorker details of the accusation contained in a letter from the woman to Ms. Feinstein. The unidentified woman alleges that Mr. Kavanaugh “held her down,” covered her mouth with his hand, and with a male classmate turned up the music so she couldn’t be heard. “She was able to free herself,” the New Yorker reported.

The magazine was given these details with enough time to contact someone close to the woman. The reporters also had time to contact the male classmate who said he had “no recollection” of the incident. For the record, Mr. Kavanaugh “categorically and unequivocally” denies the allegation.

The timeline here is damning about Democratic motivations. The New Yorker says the woman first approached Democrats in July. Yet Ms. Feinstein didn’t ask about the accusation in her meeting with Judge Kavanaugh, didn’t ask about it at the hearing, and no Democrats asked about it in their 1,278 written follow-up questions after the hearing.

So why now? As we wrote Friday, the charitable explanation is that Ms. Feinstein didn’t think it worthy enough of investigation but finally bowed under pressure from her colleagues. She’s running for re-election against a left-wing Democrat who is pounding her for not stopping Mr. Kavanaugh and on Friday hit her for a “failure of leadership” for waiting to disclose the allegations.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/doctors-forced-to-perform-mastectomies-on-children-with-gender-dysphoria/

Good grief. When I read Jane Robbins’ piece in The Federalist reporting that doctors were actually performing mastectomies on girls as young as 13 who identify as boys, I couldn’t believe my eyes. But sure enough. Not only is it happening, but a medical study published in JAMA Pediatrics recommends that children not be precluded from such radical body-altering surgery based simply on their youth:

Chest dysphoria was high among presurgical transmasculine youth, and surgical intervention positively affected both minors and young adults. Given these findings, professional guidelines and clinical practice should consider patients for chest surgery based on individual need rather than chronologic age.

Note also that doctors suppress normal puberty in children diagnosed with gender dysphoria.

This is unethical human experimentation as far as I am concerned because we don’t know the long-term physical, psychological, or emotional consequences of such interventions. And remember, some children with the condition cease to experience trans-identity as they grow older. (I hope I put that correctly.) If that happens, what then?

But Wesley, it’s a study! Sorry. In our ideological times, that doesn’t mean as much as it once did. After all, a peer-reviewed study on gender dysphoria was apologized for by Brown University because it reached an ideologically disfavored conclusion.

(In this regard, Robbins’ deconstruction of the JAMA Pediatrics study is a real eye-opener. Please read the whole thing.)

I bring this up because of the potential impact such “studies” could have on the issue of “medical conscience.” Many bioethicists, the medical intelligentsia, some Democratic politicians, as well as media pundits, wish to force doctors and other healthcare professionals to perform morally contentious procedures desired by patients–even if it violates their religious or moral beliefs. This is all part of “patient-centered care,” don’t you know.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/dianne-feinstein-brett-kavanaugh-rank-illiberalism/

Perhaps that trendy phrase about democracy dying in darkness should be Senator Feinstein’s campaign slogan?

What Senator Feinstein is currently doing to Brett Kavanaugh is evil. Yes, it is evil. It is antediluvian. It is dangerous. It is illiberal. It sits well, well outside of the American tradition, harking back to a time in which the accused were simply carted off — or shunned by polite society — ten minutes after someone prominent offered up a vague claim about them. In America, we require that our accusers make themselves known, that their accusations be offered in detail and in public, and that the accused be apprised of everything that has been leveled against them — and we require this not just within formal legal environments, but in general. Within the American tradition, these requirements are considered a prerequisite to fairness — both inside and outside the courtroom. As has become fashionable lately within her party and her state, Senator Feinstein is stamping all over those traditions, and doing so for political advantage.

Worse still, Senator Feinstein is engaged a brazen attempt to have it both ways: She wants the consequences of an accusation without any of the attendant process. Or, put more bluntly, Senator Feinstein wants to be imbued with the power to point her finger at other people and to mark them as tainted, as unacceptable, as excommunicated. That will not stand — today, tomorrow, ever.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/09/paul-manaforts-guilty-plea/

There was nothing to be gained for him or Robert Mueller in a second trial.

Paul Manafort’s guilty plea in the District of Columbia makes perfect sense. We’ve been speculating about its likelihood since Manafort was convicted three weeks ago on eight felony counts of bank and tax fraud in the Eastern District of Virginia. There was nothing to be gained for Manafort or Special Counsel Robert Mueller in a second trial.

Naturally, the media are spun up because the plea agreement, which will cap the 69-year-old Manafort’s prison time at ten years, requires Manafort’s cooperation. Anti-Trumpers have visions of the walls closing in on the president. I would counter with what I said after the Virginia convictions:

At this point, it does not appear that Mueller has a collusion case against Trump associates. His indictments involving Russian hacking and troll farms do not suggest complicity by the Trump campaign. I also find it hard to believe Mueller sees Manafort as the key to making a case on Trump when Mueller has had [Richard] Gates — Manafort’s partner — as a cooperator for six months. You have to figure Gates knows whatever Manafort knows about collusion. Yet, since Gates began cooperating with the special counsel, Mueller has filed the charges against Russians that do not implicate Trump, and has transferred those cases to other Justice Department components.

I elaborated that, when it comes to Manafort, Mueller’s focus is not President Trump. It is Russia, “specifically, Manafort’s longtime connections to Kremlin-connected operatives.” This seems consistent with what Manafort’s camp is telling the press. Politico quotes a source close to Trump’s former campaign chairman: “The cooperation agreement does not involve the Trump campaign. . . .There was no collusion with Russia.”

The guilty plea serves Mueller’s purposes. He already had Manafort looking at a potential 80 years of prison exposure from the first case. He did not need another trial and additional jail time to ratchet up pressure. So prosecutors dropped the money-laundering charges as well as allegations that Manafort made false statements and failed to register as a foreign agent of a Kremlin-connected Ukranian party; but Mueller still got Manafort to admit to the underlying conduct in those charges by having the defendant plead guilty to the special counsel’s favorite device, the amorphous, elastic charge of “conspiracy against the United States.” In addition, Manafort pled guilty to obstructing justice — the witness-tampering allegation based on which he has been detained without bail.

https://spectator.org/an-affront-to-justice/
The pathetic attacks on Brett Kavanaugh forever stain the Democrat Party.

On Thursday, word circulated that Senate Democrats — and in particular Sen. Dianne Feinstein — sent a “secret letter” to the FBI which contained an undisclosed allegation by an undisclosed person regarding an undisclosed offense supposedly committed by Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh.

When Kavanaugh was in high school, apparently.

“This matter has been referred to the FBI for investigation,” Sen. Dick Durbin told BuzzFeed News when asked about the letter on Thursday.

In a statement later Thursday, Feinstein confirmed that she had referred the letter to “federal investigative authorities.”

“I have received information from an individual concerning the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court,” Feinstein said. “That individual strongly requested confidentiality, declined to come forward or press the matter further, and I have honored that decision. I have, however, referred the matter to federal investigative authorities.”

The gist of this allegation appears to be that when Brett Kavanaugh was 17, he and a friend supposedly tried to trap a girl his age in a room at a party in an effort to initiate sexual contact of some kind. But so far as we can tell nothing sexual actually happened.

If this is all they have on Brett Kavanaugh, it’s time for the Democrats to admit they’re beaten on this nomination.

What an embarrassment to a major political party that 11th-hour surprises involving behavior as a high school student that was never brought to the attention of the police, and for which the statute of limitations would certainly have run even in the event a crime was committed, are where we are.

And for Dianne Feinstein to be trafficking in this, after surviving — thanks to the atrocious refusal of the legacy media to report it — a major scandal involving her employment of an aide who was a Chinese spy as a staffer for some 20 years is nothing short of shameful.

https://amgreatness.com/2018/09/13/hurricanes

It’s Hurricane Katrina all over again.

Since the election of climate denier Donald Trump, the politicization of major hurricanes—along with a torrent of hysterical news coverage and blame-laying—is back en vogue. During last year’s unusually active hurricane season, the media, Democratic politicians and scientific activists claimed the devastating storms were Trump’s fault even though he had been president for less than a year; some suggested voters in the red states that helped elect Trump deserved to have their property destroyed or even to be killed. (The Washington Post editorial board already this week has blamed Trump for Hurricane Florence, currently churning in the Atlantic Ocean, headed for the Carolinas)

George W. Bush never politically recovered from the fallout of Katrina in 2005; the Left and NeverTrump are now following that successful playbook against the current Republican president.

That’s why the media and political class continue to rehash Hurricane Maria, which ravaged the island of Puerto Rico just over a year ago. They want this to be Trump’s Katrina. Amid the release of a scientifically questionable report last month that significantly raised the number of deaths attributable to Maria, Trump is again on the defensive about his culpability in the tragedy. In two tweets Thursday morning, Trump rejected the study’s estimate that 2,975 people died because of Maria-related causes, and that Democrats were using the dubious report to “in order to make me look as bad as possible.”

He’s right.

It’s been their strategy since Hurricane Maria started forming in the Atlantic last summer. San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulin Cruz spent days blasting the president in front of any news camera she could find after the Category 4 storm made landfall on September 20, 2017 as her poverty-stricken constituents struggled to recover. Cruz accused the president of an act of “genocide” for not responding quicker to Maria as supplies such as bottled water sat unused and undistributed in storage areas. Political pundits insisted Trump’s (allegedly) inadequate action was because he’s a bigot. (Cruz is now being condemned for politicizing the tragedy and is under investigation by the FBI for corruption.)

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2018/09/13/barack-obama-fueled-government-distrust-elected-donald-trump-column/1260175002/
Who cares if Obama belatedly cheers for transparency and accountability? He should admit that he made the government more dangerous at home and abroad.

Former president Barack Obama is back. He kicked off a series of campaign appearances last week with a blistering attack on the Trump administration and said the Republican Party had “embraced a rising absolutism.” President Donald Trump deserves plenty of harsh criticism, but Obama’s indictment is akin to the kid who killed his parents and then sought mercy from the judge because he was an orphan.

Obama declared that“the biggest threat to our democracy is cynicism.” He also called for “a restoration of honesty and decency and lawfulness in our government.” But his eight years as president fueled the distrust of Washingtonthat Obama now condemns.

How can Obama blame Americans for being cynical after repeating dozens of times his false promise that “If you like your doctor, you’ll be able to keep your doctor,” despite the dozens of mandates in Obamacare? How can he blame Americans for being cynical after his 2015 assertion that “it is easier for a teenager to buy a Glock than get his hands on a computer or even a book”? How can he castigate cynics after he campaigned in 2008 on a peace platform and then proceeded to bomb seven nations? How can he complain about distrust after he flip-flopped on illegal surveillance and unleashed the National Security Administration to target anyone “searching the web for suspicious stuff”?
Obama created the problems he lists