RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://goudsmit.pundicity.com/21294/lying-spying-propagandizing-oh-my
http://goudsmit.pundicity.com
: http://lindagoudsmit.com

The Obama administration has been caught lying, spying, and propagandizing. In a cosmically outrageous attempt to defend the indefensible, the radical leftist Obama lemmings have decided that lying, spying, and propagandizing are not only acceptable – they are desirable – for our own good of course. OH MY!

In an astonishing display of arrogant disregard for the Constitution and its protections, James Clapper unapologetically announced that he spied on President Trump to protect him – REALLY?? Just how stupid do Obama’s sycophants think we are?

The entire Mueller investigation designed to destroy President Trump has boomeranged onto its blatantly anti-Trump team of “investigators” exposing their malice, contempt, and staggering improprieties. Their malfeasance is a continuation of Obama’s egregious politicization of the DOJ, FBI and State Department.

The question for America is “Should we be surprised?” I don’t think so.

When Obama promised to transform America most Americans imagined a better life of peace and prosperity in our republic. They did not envision the foundational principles of the Constitution being shattered in an unprecedented power grab to replace our national sovereignty and Constitutional infrastructure with collectivism and global governance. Lying, spying, and propagandizing are not the tactics American citizens expect the US government to use on Americans! Foreign enemies? Yes. American citizens? ABSOLUTLY NOT!

In a stunning 6.8.18 article KrisAnne Hall describes how Obama changed all that. Richard Stengel, Obama’s head of the office for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs at the State Department from 2013-2016 supports the use of “fake news.” WHAT??? Stengel unapologetically announced to the Council on Foreign Relations Forum that he is not against propaganda. “Every country does it, and they have to do it to their own population, and I don’t necessarily think it’s that awful.” Really Mr Stengel?? Most Americans would disagree with you. Most Americans do not want or expect to be propagandized by their government. Most Americans expect honesty and transparency from those elected to serve them.

Stengel’s egregious condescending attitude was part of Obama’s transformation-of-America policy. In 2013 Congress passed the mendacious Smith-Mundt Modernization Act that overturned the 1948 Smith-Mundt Act prohibiting the domestic dissemination of US government-produced propaganda. The “modernization” was disingenuously hidden in the National Defense Authorization Act Fiscal Year 2013 as if it was protective of Americans!

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/06/ig-report-clinton-emails-fix-was-in/The fix was in.

Despite the sprawl of Justice Department inspector general Michael Horowitz’s 568-page report on the Clinton-emails investigation, there is precious little discussion of the most important issue: The Justice Department and FBI’s rationale for declining to prosecute Hillary Clinton. I believe this is intentional. The inspector general’s message is: “Despite pervasive political bias and investigative irregularities, which I have comprehensively documented, rest assured that nothing too terrible happened here.”

That silver-lining version of this dark spectacle could not have survived a searching analysis of the decision not to indict.

In explaining themselves to the IG, Obama Justice Department and FBI officials contended that the make-or-break issue in the case was whether they could prove mens rea — criminal state of mind. In this instance, that involved former secretary of state Clinton’s knowledge and intent regarding the unauthorized transmission and retention of classified information. Investigators say it dawned on them at a very early stage that they could not. Hence, they urge, their decisions to allow the election calendar to impose a time limit on the investigation, to limit the amount of evidence they considered, to be less than aggressive in obtaining evidence, and to draft an exoneration of Clinton months before interviewing her (and other key witnesses), were entirely reasonable.

Yet their analysis left out the best intent evidence, namely, Clinton’s willful setting up of a private, non-secure server system for all official business

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/06/southern-poverty-law-center-maajid-nawaz/

British Muslim reformer Maajid Nawaz complained after it defamed him and hurt fund-raising for his organization. It’s now paying him more than $3 million.

Any free society must expect that a certain number of chancers, hucksters, and shake-down artists will prosper among them. But rarely have they come in so grossly endowed and shameless a guise as the “Southern Poverty Law Center.”

The SPLC was founded in the 1970s, and back then it did some respectable campaigning work to target and shut down — through legal means — actually racist organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan. All well and good, and the SPLC can still be applauded for this work. And yet students of non-profits and charities worldwide will be familiar with a certain tendency in this field, which is that such organizations rarely shut themselves down. Or, to put it another way, a charity set up to cure a disease may find a cure for that disease and yet strangely also find some reasons to continue. For of course salaries and pensions are at stake. Comfortable halos have been created. Who would want to divest themselves of the gold and glory that comes from such a sinecure? And so the charity will become, for instance, a charity to help people who once suffered from the disease that has now been cured.

So it is — though in far worse form — with the KKK and the SPLC. Of course as the KKK dwindled to an all but negligible fringe, the SPLC could not afford to bask in its victories. There was still cash to collect. Indeed more cash than ever. And who but a fool, or an honest man, would leave tens of millions of dollars on the table? So it is that in recent years the SPLC reoriented itself. It became an organization that looked into all those things that were not racist but that might be deemed right of center. It decided to look into not terrorism and racism but “extremism.” It decided, in particular, that it should become the self-appointed arbiter of what is acceptable in American life and what is unacceptable. For years the mainstream press, lazy on its memories of the SPLC’s past manifestation, indulged it in its new self-definition. Indeed for a few years the words “whom the SPLC has described as” wormed their way into some of America’s — and the world’s — most otherwise respectable and usually fact-reliant publications.

https://amgreatness.com/2018/06/19/a-comedy-of-corruption-or-a-bureau

If the stakes were not so high, the 568-page report issued last week by the Justice Department Office of the Inspector General (“A Review of Various Actions by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Department of Justice in Advance of the 2016 Election”) might be seen as a species of comedy, something out of Plautus, perhaps (starring Peter Strzok as the Miles Gloriosus and Lisa Page as Philocomasium), or Dickens’s Little Dorrit with its Office of Circumlocution.

Item: The report “did not find documentary or testimonial evidence that improper considerations, including political bias, directly affected the specific investigative decisions we reviewed.” Ha, ha, ha.

As Andrew Klavan observed, that is simply inspector-generalese for, “No one confessed or left a paper trail.”

No, Kimberly Strassel was right in her recent column for the Wall Street Journal: the IG report is dripping with evidence of political bias. It’s just that it deploys the evidence like a troupe of players on the stage and then tells you that the burglary you just saw enacted might have been the innocent parson out for a stroll.

Item: After discussing some of the thousands of text messages between Peter Strzok—the top FBI honcho who ran both the pretend investigation into Hillary Clinton’s mishandling of classified materials and the first phases of Trump-Russia fantasy—and his lover Lisa Page (then counsel to Andrew McCabe, who was the FBI’s deputy director at the time), the report concludes that Strzok’s decision to focus on the counterintelligence probe of the Trump campaign rather than the Clinton email criminal investigation “led us to conclude that we did not have confidence that Strzok’s decision was free from bias.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/06/the_ig_report_theyre_guilty_but_its_okay.html

The IG report is really Comey 2.0. Comey spent a long time describing how Hillary had broken the law but then concluded that it was okay. Similarly, the IG report lists example after example of political bias but declares that it had no impact on the Hillary email whitewash.

The IG report on the Clinton email investigation is proof positive that the entire DC justice establishment is corrupt; that they view themselves a rulers not public servants.

First we were told that Comey was a straight shooter whom we could trust. Then we were told the same about Mueller, Rosenstein, and now the IG. Yet in every case we’ve discovered that they are biased political actors who put the interests of the Deep State and the Democratic Party ahead of their sworn duty to uphold the law. It’s time for all conservatives to acknowledge that there are few if any honest people at the top levels of the FBI or the DoJ.

Not surprisingly highly biased people will resort to big lies to protect their power and the big government ideology they embrace.

The big lie in the Comey report was that because Hillary supposedly had no intent to mishandle classified data there was no crime. Yet a Navy seaman who demonstrated no intent to mishandle classified data was sent to prison. Further, the law says that intent is not a requirement.

There are many laws that can be broken even if the person lacks intent. Take manslaughter — if person A kills person B accidently because person A was very careless, then person A is guilty even though they never intended to kill person B.

http://www.atimes.com/tag/spengler/
The US president’s opponents in the the upper chamber aim to overturn his carefully constructed compromise with Beijing over the Chinese telecom giant ZTE

The bright line that separates Donald Trump’s foreign policy from his predecessors is the question of regime change. Between the collapse of communism in 1989 and the departure of the Obama Administration, the American foreign policy establishment embraced the “end of history” premise that liberal democracy would replace all the autocracies of the past, and that the goal of American foreign policy was to hasten the inevitable march of history. Trump, by contrast, puts American interests first and will make deals that reinforce the position of the Chinese, Russian, or North Korean regimes if the outcome is in America’s interest.

Now Trump’s opponents in the Republican Party – the neo-conservative caucus including Senators John McCain (R-AZ), Marco Rubio (R-FL), and Lindsey Graham (R-SC) – have thrown a monkey wrench into the works, in the form of legislation that would overturn Trump’s carefully-constructed compromise with China over the Chinese telecom giant ZTE.

American diplomacy achieved a landmark result in Trump’s Singapore summit with Kim Jong-un, offering the repugnant North Korean leader legitimacy and the prospect of regime continuity in return for his nuclear weapons program. The president’s “Art of the Deal” negotiating style had less to do with the constructive outcome than old-fashioned diplomacy under the skillful guidance of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo: Consultation with allies, back-channel exchanges with the other side, and a proposal that both sides could live with. Asia Times published on June 10 former South Korean Foreign Minister Yoon Young-Kwan’s guide to getting a “yes” from Pyongyang, and a Pompeo adviser told me that South Korean insights were incorporated into the American initiative.

https://www.aol.com/article/news/2018/06/18/trumps-approval-rating-just-reached-its-highest-level-yet-in-the-gold-standard-of-presidential-indicators/23462168/

President Donald Trump’s approval rating is at an all-time high of 45% in the Gallup weekly tracking poll.
And his disapproval rating has hit a near-low of 50%.
His current approval rating at his point in his presidency lines up with the ratings of other presidents at similar points in their first terms.
His new spike in approval could take a hit due to the backlash against the administration’s controversial policy that has led to separating families at the border.

President Donald Trump’s approval rating has reached an all-time high of 45% in a Gallup poll released on Sunday.

https://amgreatness.com/2018/06/18/the-dream-and-the-nightmare

After World War II, only the United States possessed the capital, the military, freedom, and the international good will to arrest the spread of global Stalinism. To save the fragile postwar West, America was soon willing to rebuild and rearm war-torn former democracies. Over seven decades, it intervened in proxy wars against Soviet and Chinese clients, and radical rogue regimes. It accepted asymmetrical and unfavorable trade as the price of leading and saving the West. America became the sole patron for dozens of needy clients—with no time limit on such asymmetry.

Yet what would become the globalized project was predicated on lots of flawed, but unquestioned assumptions:

The great wealth and power of the United States was limitless. It alone could afford to subsidize other nations. Any commercial or military wound was always considered superficial and well worth the cost of protecting the civilized order.

Only by piling up huge surpluses with the United States and avoiding costly defense expenditure through American military subsidies, could the shattered nations of Asia and Europe supposedly regain their security, prosperity and freedom. There was no shelf life on such dependencies.

American popular culture, democracy, and free-market consumer capitalism would spread beyond the West. It created a new world order of sameness and harmony—predicated on the idea that the United States must ensure, at great costs, free trade, free commerce, free travel, and free communications in a new interconnected global world. The more American largess, the more likely places from Shanghai to Lagos would eventually operate on the premises of Salt Lake City or Los Angeles. The world would inevitably reach the end of history as something like Palo Alto, the Upper West Side, or Georgetown.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270488/deep-state-and-tyranny-bruce-thornton

The Department of Justice Inspector General’s Report released last week didn’t tell us anything we didn’t know, but merely added more damning evidence for the corruption of the FBI and its investigations over the last few years. More worthy of comment, as Andy McCarthy writes, is its refusal to use common sense and note the obvious interconnections among the various bad actors, and the bond of political bias, seasoned with careerism and arrogance, that united them.

But the problems we are confronting reflect deeper dangers than the professional corruption of some functionaries of corrupt executive agencies armed with the coercive power of the state. The true moral of the story is the dangers to freedom of centralized and concentrated power––the very dangers consensual governments, including our own, were created to minimize.

The issue of political bias, which the IG report scanted, has to be understood in the larger nature of the large-scale bureaucratic public institutions that comprise the Deep State. In other words, the structure and functioning of the institution itself creates a bias that selects progressive employees. The bias insidiously becomes a second nature of which they often are no more conscious than a fish is that it’s wet.

Leftist ideology from Marxism to Progressivism is particularly useful for creating such self-serving agencies. American progressivism was founded on the conceit that “technopolitics,” the notion that modernity requires specialists and experts in the “human sciences” who can most efficiently manage the state. The old democratic and republican notion that virtue, practical experience, and common sense, none of which is dependent on university credentials, are adequate for citizens to govern no matter their wealth, lineage, or education.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/fbi-inspector-general-report-directly-criticized-president-obama/

On Thursday, the Justice Department inspector general released a sprawling 568-page report on the handling of the Hillary Clinton emails investigation in 2015-16 by the FBI and DOJ. There’s far too much in the report to detail here in one bite, as it covered (among other things):

The decision not to charge Secretary Clinton or anyone else for the mishandling of State Department emails, some containing classified information, by routing them through her now-infamous “homebrew” server (a decision that looks ever more reckless now that we have all focused more intently on the voracious email-hacking appetite of hostile powers such as Russia and China);
The also now-notorious tarmac meeting between Attorney General Loretta Lynch and Bill Clinton, and the impact of Lynch’s refusal to recuse herself from the investigation;
The decisions by Jim Comey to make public statements in July and October 2016 in the midst of the election;
The ethical conflicts of FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe (over his wife’s receipt of campaign donations from Clinton ally Terry McAuliffe), and McCabe’s role in slow-walking the followup investigation of Anthony Weiner’s laptop;
The ethical conflicts of Assistant Attorney General Peter Kadzik and his ties to John Podesta and the Clinton campaign;
Jim Comey’s own use of a Gmail account for official FBI business, as well as that of others at the FBI;
The affair between FBI agent Peter Strzok and FBI attorney Lisa Page and their various text messages (some more related to the Russia investigation, which was outside the scope of the IG report) bashing Trump;
The ethical tangles of the FBI’s decision to allow Hillary Clinton to be represented at her interview by lawyers who were also key witnesses;
Pervasive FBI leaks and the receipt of various financial benefits by FBI agents from the media; and
An FBI Twitter document dump on the Clinton Foundation a week before the election.

Nobody comes out of this report looking good, and it is hard to blame voters who come away feeling vindicated in the view that that the entire class of elected officials, civil servants, and the press are a corrupt racket.