RUTHFULLY YOURS

Progressive obsessions with race and class blur individual achievement. Those of the past instead are judged as one-dimensional players, either good or bad based on their perceived liberalism as interpreted by 2017 standards.

The humane General James Longstreet and the racist General Nathan Bedford Forrest are equally culpable because they fought for the Confederacy. It doesn’t matter that Teddy Roosevelt was an environmentalist and trust-buster when few others were — because his views of imperialism were uncouth by our standards.

In contrast, the racist eugenicist Margaret Sanger is spared progressive hell, because her pro-abortion advocacy helped found what became Planned Parenthood.

The scary thing about contemporary progressivism is this reduction of individuals to cardboard cutouts, whose sins and saintly works fade before cosmic concepts of race and gender.

Making the Necessary Allowances
Exemptions work in the present, too. Leftists think that state-mandated equality is of such critical importance that illiberal means are sometimes excusable to achieve it.

For example, Trump’s supposed collusion with Russia is declared a danger to the republic. So the Steele–Fusion GPS file of unverified smears about a presidential candidate, based on bought Russian fabrications, is renamed as mere “opposition research,” a means necessary to stop a threat such as Donald Trump.

Another example is the current campus tendency to suspend constitutionally protected due process when students are merely accused of sexual assault, or to deny free speech in order to shield students from views they find illiberal.

Exemption is more than just normal human hypocrisy. It takes such contradictions to a cosmic plane and is far more effective than pseudo-confessionals and apologies, individual contextualization, claims of victimization, and blame-gaming that humans seek refuge in when caught in hypocrisies.

As a corollary, liberals can escape the ramifications of their own ideologies. They may place their personal interests “in context” by public professions of caring. Recently, liberal journalists Mark Halperin and Leon Wieseltier were exposed as long-time serial sexual harassers — or worse — a fact that many of their associates must have long overlooked, given their support for feminist agendas.

Next to exemption is the closely related doctrine of secular penance (or the cessation of punishment through purchased indulgences). It usually follows when the currency of exemption is finally exhausted. Personal sins are then absolved by assertions of liberal orthodoxies. When desperate and in extremis, liberals find absolution by promising to do compensatory liberal good works — feminism, environmentalism, and identity politics become their feel-good version of hair shirts, ashes, and fasting.

Had Ted Kennedy not been heir to a liberal dynasty and later pronounced the progressive “Lion of the Senate,” he might have somewhere along his career path been charged with everything from involuntary manslaughter to sexual assault — and on the latter grounds ended his career in the fashion of a Senator Robert Packwood or Bill O’Reilly.

We have seen plenty examples of both exemption and penance recently.

Exemption
Take the Uranium One deal. Most liberals knew that after 2008 Hillary Clinton would run for president in 2016 and thus, they hoped, complete a 16-year Obama-Clinton progressive trajectory.

You never know what’s going to set people off.

In a Monday column on special prosecutor Bob Mueller’s indictment of former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, I opined that the case seems to be “much ado about nothing,” and that some of the allegations that have been brought appear “shaky and overcharged.” Some commentators took this to mean that, being in the tank for Trump, I am pooh-poohing Mueller’s opening gambit.

Not so. Readers who follow these columns know that I am not knee-jerk pro- or anti-Trump. I’ve opined that “Paul Manafort is a sleazeball.” And, while I concededly have strong political views, I try to be coldly clinical about legal questions and prosecution theories. That is my professional training, and the skill of being a prosecutor involves recognizing weaknesses in the case — you never want the defense lawyers to spot them first.

Much Ado about Nothing
To be clear, I am not saying the case is unserious for Manafort and Richard Gates. I am saying it is “much ado about nothing” in the greater scheme of things — meaning: Mueller’s (highly elastic) mandate is to investigate Russian meddling in the 2016 election and any possible Trump-campaign collusion therein; yet the Manafort case is utterly unrelated to that. (Maybe I should have said the indictment is “nothing about much ado”!)

Moreover, when I said the case is “shaky and overcharged,” I qualified that with “at least in part.” That is because there are felonies of which Manafort and Gates appear to be guilty, which is a very consequential matter for them. Nevertheless, the indictment’s presentation of much of the case is overhyped.

Unquestionably, Mueller is not done with his investigation. I am more than a little surprised to be criticized by some for purportedly suggesting that this is the end, rather than the start, of the special counsel’s case. I have been saying since the summer that Mueller is trying to squeeze Manafort into becoming a cooperating witness. Necessarily, that means he plans to keep building his case.

More to the point, there is a glaring omission in the indictment, which suggests that Mueller is planning to supersede it with more charges.

The Missing Tax Charges
In my haste to cover what is in the indictment, I left out of the column what is not: There are no tax charges. The indictment not only mentions tax evasion in various places; the commission of tax crimes is a key element of the money-laundering conspiracy charged in Count Two. Yet despite detailing that Manafort and Gates submitted fraudulent tax returns, the indictment does not accuse them of tax-law felonies that the prosecutors would be required to prove beyond a reasonable doubt at trial.

This is curious, and I don’t know if the explanation is substantive or administrative.

By substantive, I mean that there could be legal and factual issues unknown to me that complicate the taxability of Manafort’s prodigious foreign earnings. As a former prosecutor, I try to stay mindful of something that gets harder to remember as my prosecutor days recede in the rear-view mirror: There were always things about my cases that struck outsiders as odd but would not have if they had known what I knew. The prosecutors know things about their evidence that we don’t. They may have a good reason that I haven’t figured out for eschewing tax counts.

The Halloween assault in Lower Manhattan was straight out of the ISIS playbook. Ever since October 2010, when al-Qaida published the second issue of its online magazine Inspire, jihadi leaders have been urging the faithful to turn ordinary cars and trucks into killing machines to “mow down the enemies of Allah.” On Tuesday in New York, Sayfullo Saipov, 29, a green-card holder from Uzbekistan in Central Asia and resident of Florida, who appears to have come to the United States through the so-called “Diversity Visa” lottery, responded to the call. He drove his rented Home Depot truck from West Houston Street onto a Hudson River Park bike path, one of New York’s most beloved amenities. Within ten minutes, eight people were killed and 15 were injured. A note found in the truck, law enforcement officials said, indicated that Saipov committed the attack out of devotion to ISIS.

At a news conference at 1 Police Plaza less than two hours after the deadly attack, John Miller, the New York Police Department’s chief of counterterrorism, cited the Islamic State’s updated guidance to jihadi aspirants contained in the third November 2016 issue of its own online journal, Rumiya (Rome), as the attacker’s probable inspiration. The article encouraged followers to attack “large outdoor conventions and celebrations, pedestrian-congested streets, outdoor markets, festivals, festivals, parades, [and] political rallies.” It even specified the ideal type, weight, and speed of a car needed for terror purposes, according to a translation provided by the Counter-Extremism Project.

It seems likely that the killer’s original target may have been the famous Greenwich Village Halloween parade, another beloved New York tradition that close to 1 million people typically attend. But the NYPD’s overwhelming security presence, and the numerous street closures adjacent to the parade, may have dashed his dreams of an even more memorable massacre.

While the attack investigation is ongoing and details of Saipov’s motives and plans are still being gathered, the vehicle assault bore the hallmarks of the attacks that ISIS and other militant jihadi groups have long been promoting. NYPD commissioner James O’Neill said that the terrorist emerged from his rental vehicle after crashing into a school bus screaming a statement that indicated terrorist intent. While the politically attuned O’Neill declined to identify what the attacker shouted, the language in which he was shouting, or his suspected nationality, numerous eye witnesses said that the man, dressed in dark clothing and carrying a pellet gun and a paint-ball gun, was screaming “Allahu Akhbar”—“God is Great” in Arabic.

Governor Cuomo pointed out another hallmark of a vehicle assault. The perp, he said, was one of those “lone wolves” who “meant to cause pain and harm and probably death and the resulting terror.”

But it takes a pack to raise a lone wolf. Even if Saipov acted alone, he was part of a growing ideological fraternity numbering in the tens of thousands who now inhabit every region of the globe. Those seeking eternal glory have staged similar attacks in at least a dozen other cities—from Nice to Paris to Barcelona to London to Jerusalem. Like the attacks in these cities, the Halloween attack in Lower Manhattan was aimed at inflicting maximum carnage. Schools in the area were letting out students shortly after three o’clock when Saipov drove his rented truck off West Houston Street onto the bike path. There was no shortage of targets. The streets between West Houston and Chambers were crowded with parents picking up their costumed children prepared for an evening of trick-or-treating. Pedestrians and bikers on the Hudson River bike path were stunned and helpless as Saipov careened his weapon through the crowd.

In lower Manhattan on Tuesday afternoon, a Muslim named Sayfullo Saipov, screaming “Allah akbar,” drove a rented truck along a bicycle path, killing at least eight people and injuring numerous others. According to Al Arabiya, “New York state governor Andrew Cuomo told media that there is no evidence to suggest wider plot or wider scheme.” And Time.com reported that Cuomo said that there was no “evidence of an ongoing threat or any additional threat.”

No evidence to suggest a wider plot or an ongoing threat? Really, Governor? Here’s some: last June, the Islamic State published a poster depicting an SUV driving over a heap of skulls and bearing the legend “Run Over Them Without Mercy.”

Also, the Islamic State issued this call in September 2014:

So O muwahhid, do not let this battle pass you by wherever you may be. You must strike the soldiers, patrons, and troops of the tawaghit. Strike their police, security, and intelligence members, as well as their treacherous agents. Destroy their beds. Embitter their lives for them and busy them with themselves. If you can kill a disbelieving American or European — especially the spiteful and filthy French — or an Australian, or a Canadian, or any other disbeliever from the disbelievers waging war, including the citizens of the countries that entered into a coalition against the Islamic State, then rely upon Allah, and kill him in any manner or way however it may be….If you are not able to find an IED or a bullet, then single out the disbelieving American, Frenchman, or any of their allies. Smash his head with a rock, or slaughter him with a knife, or run him over with your car, or throw him down from a high place, or choke him, or poison him….

Many Muslims in the West have heeded this call. Last August, there was a vehicular jihad attack in Barcelona. The week before that in France, a Muslim named Hamou Bachir hit six French soldiers with his car in Levallois-Perret, where the headquarters of the DGSI (General Directorate for Internal Security), the country’s primary counter-terrorism intelligence agency, are located. In June, a Muslim drove his car into a crowd on the London Bridge and then jumped out and started stabbing people. We have seen several other vehicular jihadis get out of the car after they plowed into pedestrians, and start stabbing people. In June 2015, a Muslim in Austria drove his car into a crowd, killing three, and then got out and stabbed passersby. Then in November 2016, a Muslim student at Ohio State University named Abdul Razak Ali Artan drove his car into a crowd, then got out and stabbed several others.

There have been many others in 2016 and this year: in Nice, in Berlin, in Jerusalem, in Paris, and elsewhere. Yet Andrew Cuomo and others among the political elites resolutely refuse to connect the dots between these jihad attacks, which have an obvious connection with one another in sharing the same motivating ideology and the same goal.

Saipov, meanwhile, has been identified as a native of Uzbekistan. It has not yet been revealed under what circumstances Saipov entered the United States, but however he came here, his actions today indicate the crying need for immigration reform, and the correctness of the underlying principle behind President Trump’s much-maligned travel bans.

No doubt when Saipov came here, he was deemed a “moderate.” The current immigration and refugee apparatuses do not even make any serious attempt to determine whether or not a Muslim entering the United States has jihad sentiments – an enterprise which would be essentially impossible in any case. The unpleasant fact remains that it is impossible to distinguish jihadis from peaceful Muslim refugees. If, however, President Trump tries to use this incident in order to broaden his travel ban, the response will be the familiar cries of “bigotry” and “Islamophobia,” and the Hate-America Left will go into high gear again to stop his action in the courts.

And so it goes in the daily life of the contemporary West: another jihad massacre, and more denial and willful ignorance.

An explosive story by Sean Davis at The Federalist reveals that President Obama’s PAC, Obama for America, paid nearly $1 million in 2016 to the law firm that retained Fusion GPS, the consulting group responsible for the infamous Trump “dossier.” According to Davis, Federal Election Commission records show the Democratic National Committee, Hillary Clinton’s campaign, and Obama’s PAC paid Perkins Coie more than $12 million last year alone. https://amgreatness.com/2017/10/31/obamas-shady-trump-russia-spinmeister/

The article also notes that Neil King, Jr.—the husband of Shailagh Murray, one of Obama’s former senior advisors—went on to work for Fusion GPS shortly after the election. King was a longtime Wall Street Journal reporter who, while at the Journal, was also a colleague of Glenn Simpson, one of Fusion GPS’s founders. These links were never divulged in any of King’s election coverage for the Journal. These ties could explain the Obama White House’s almost daily attention to the Trump-Russia collusion plotline, fueled largely by Josh Earnest, Obama’s press secretary.

From the White House press podium, Earnest played a critical role in tossing Trump-Russia conspiracy chum to an eager White House press pool. He conferred White House credibility to a politically connected cybersecurity firm that claimed Russian hackers hit the DNC server; wove a tale of Trump campaign collusion after the election in a shameful attempt to discredit the president-elect; and, just days before Trump’s inauguration, childishly compared Trump’s obligation to defend himself against the dossier to Obama’s need to defend against “birther” allegations.

In retrospect, knowing what we know now, particularly that the spouse of one of Earnest’s colleagues was close to and subsequently hired by the same outfit digging up dirt on Obama’s biggest political foe, Earnest’s conduct calls into question the integrity of Obama’s communications shop both before and after the election.

Earnest first floated the Russia-hacked-the-election meme during his press briefing on July 25, 2016. It was the same day the FBI announced it would investigate “cyber intrusion involving the DNC” related to the hacking of that organization’s email server earlier in the year. But while the FBI’s statement did not mention Russia, Earnest—with the help of some willing reporters—fueled the unsubstantiated but politically explosive plot line that the Russians hacked the DNC, even suggesting it was an attempt to help Donald Trump.

Here is an exchange on July 25, 2016, between Associated Press reporter Josh Lederman and Earnest at the beginning of the daily briefing, one day after the emails exposed via the DNC hack led to chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s ouster at the Philadelphia convention:

Lederman: Turning to the investigation into this hack that the FBI is now leading . . . are you prepared to say anything about whether Russia was involved in this hack and whether it may have been an attempt by a foreign state to try and sway the election towards Donald Trump?

Earnest: I know that there’s been a lot of public reporting about this particular matter and I know that there are some private sector entities that have conducted their own investigations and even released their own reports on these investigations. So the FBI has put out a statement indicating that they are investigating this situation . . . we know that there are a variety of actors who are looking for vulnerabilities in the cybersecurity of the United States, and that includes Russia.

*record scratch* Wait, what? The DNC server is hacked, no one knows who did it, but it’s automatically presumed to be helping Trump?

Further, the “entity” Earnest refers to is Crowdstrike, the firm hired by the DNC to investigate the hack. (We now know Perkins Coie also hired Crowdstrike on behalf of the DNC to look into the breach. To date, the DNC refuses to surrender its server to the FBI for a forensic analysis.) In June 2016, Crowdstrike posted a blog article identifying “two separate Russian intelligence-affiliated adversaries present in the DNC network” and concluded, “attacks against electoral candidates and the parties they represent are likely to continue up until the election.” Trump’s name was never mentioned, and early news articles reported the hackers did it to gain “opposition research on Donald Trump.” So, how could anyone conclude that the DNC hack was intended to help Trump?

The driver who plowed into a group of people on Tuesday, killing 8, left behind handwritten notes pledging loyalty to ISIS along with an image of an ISIS flag inside his vehicle.

Sayfullo Saipov, 29, had the notes written in Arabic inside his Home Depot rental truck along with a picture of the ISIS flag, according to law enforcement sources.

The handwritten notes indicated that he had pledged allegiance to the terror group, the sources said.

Investigators discovered the materials inside his truck after the rampage in lower Manhattan.

The New York Times reported Tuesday night that Saipov had previously been on the radar of law enforcement as a result of an unrelated investigation.

It wasn’t clear if Saipov was the main target of that probe or just an associate of another figure being investigated, according to the report, which cited unnamed sources.