RUTHFULLY YOURS

There have been roughly two sorts of Democratic presidents over the last century. A few were revolutionaries who sought to take the country leftward with them. They were masters of “never letting a serious crisis go to waste” transformations and came to power after the chaos of national crises and near collapse.

Franklin Roosevelt created the modern notion of intrusive, redistributive government during the panic of the Depression. Lyndon Johnson, following the trauma of the John F. Kennedy assassination, pushed through the Great Society, which institutionalized the idea that it was the duty of government to use its power and money to seek an equality of result among the citizenry.

Barack Obama, following the economic crisis of 2008, sought to implant “lead from behind” foreign policy and an update of the Great Society, and to “fundamentally transform” the country, usually by focusing on identity politics as the core of the culture (in which the color of our skin rather than the content of our character would brand us for who we are).

In contrast, Democratic presidents such as Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy, Jimmy Carter, and Bill Clinton acted more as caretakers. They more or less administered what they had inherited but lacked the ideological fervor (or perhaps the political savvy or desire) to take the state further leftward.

The immediate Republican antidotes to Democratic revolutionaries were rarely themselves counter-revolutionaries. Dwight Eisenhower modestly tried to pull the country back to the center after 20 years of the New Deal — but nonetheless was hounded unmercifully for trying to do so. The supposedly dark and evil Richard Nixon instituted wage and price controls, created the EPA, and went to China. He did not dismantle the Great Society.

A true conservative revolutionary has been rare — Goldwater failed to get elected, and Reagan, without both houses of Congress, ended up more moderate than he expected and was followed in office by a Republican centrist.

Nonetheless, the media and the Left, in their respective arenas, howled that these modest corrections back to the center by Eisenhower, Nixon, and now Trump were nihilistic and extreme.

True to form, we are now hearing those same end-of-days accusations — even as Trump seeks to bring the U.S. back to about where it was between 1980 and 1992. Note that this endless cycle of change and counter-change is not a static phenomenon but incrementally (and over time radically) takes government and the culture ever more leftward.

So far, Trump has adopted the old Bill Clinton approach to illegal immigration, a formerly centrist but now strangely unorthodox position: He favors law enforcement rather than politically inspired amnesties calibrated to give him electoral and demographic political advantage.

His appeals to the white working classes are right out of the Clinton-Gore appeals in 1992, and they’re a rehash of Reagan’s courting of Democrats.

For many weeks, we’ve watched the Democrats and their allies in the media attempt to hide what is now an established fact: the Obama administration spied on the Trump campaign and transition team. The principal method of obfuscation is an effort to link Trump’s people to Russia’s efforts to influence our election. But there is a secondary effort that also needs to be addressed.

Ridicule is a powerful weapon. There a consistent media effort to ridicule President Trump by intentionally misunderstanding him. There is a parallel effort to ridicule the discoveries of House Intelligence chairman Nunes by questioning his methods for getting to the truth. The important point is that Nunes got to the truth.

Eli Lake writing in BloombergView reports that on dozens of occasions, Obama national security adviser Susan Rice requested raw intelligence reports involving members of the Trump team.

The intelligence, which is routinely collected on foreign nationals, adheres to a strict policy of masking any American inadvertently eavesdropped upon. On multiple occasions, Rice had the American Trump team members unmasked. Quoting Lake, “[o]ne U.S. official familiar with the reports said they contained valuable political information on the Trump transition such as whom the Trump team was meeting, the views of Trump associates on foreign policy matters and plans for the incoming administration.” That is spying, pure and simple.

We all need to guard against letting our partisan perspectives interfere with sound judgment.

I want my liberal friends to ponder the following. The raw intelligence came from the NSA. They collect virtually everything communicated electronically. I’m told that the NSA often picks ordinary private face-to-face conversions. When a government official can pick through NSA transcripts, identify the ones she wants, remove all privacy safeguards, disseminate them, and leak them to the press, we’ve effectively repealed the Fourth Amendment.

We have been distracted by the investigations of Russian interference in our election and by the Democrats’ vain hope of tying the Trump team to this interference. All we know about Russian influence is that they hacked John Podesta’s emails. We can all agree that hacking into and disseminating other people’s private communications is a bad thing. It’s bad if the Russians did it, but not really any worse than if it had been done by a teenager in the next block. Hacking is a bad – period.

Call it the tale of two National Security Advisers, Michael Flynn and Susan Rice. As much as Flynn has taken fire as being an architect of unspecified “collusion” with the Russians, Susan Rice has been like the iceberg that sank the Titanic — barely visible above water but dangerous enough to threaten the Trump administration’s ship of state.

As reported by Circa News, Rice, while serving as Obama’s National Security Adviser, requested the unmasking of the names of Team Trump officials mentioned in the so-called “incidental” surveillance of the Trump transition team:

Computer logs that former President Obama’s team left behind in the White House indicate his national security adviser Susan Rice accessed numerous intelligence reports during Obama’s last seven months in office that contained National Security Agency intercepts involving Donald Trump and his associates, Circa has learned.

Intelligence sources said the logs discovered by National Security Council staff suggested Rice’s interest in the NSA materials, some of which included unmasked Americans’ identities, appeared to begin last July around the time Trump secured the GOP nomination and accelerated after Trump’s election in November launched a transition that continued through January.

The intelligence reports included some intercepts of Americans talking to foreigners and many more involving foreign leaders talking about the future president, his campaign associates or his transition, the sources said. Most if not all had nothing to do with the Russian election interference scandal, the sources said, speaking only on condition of anonymity given the sensitive nature of the materials.

Ordinarily, such references to Americans would be redacted or minimized by the NSA before being shared with outside intelligence sources, but in these cases names were sometimes unmasked at the request of Rice or the intelligence reports were specific enough that the American’s identity was easily ascertained, the sources said.

Well, isn’t that special? While Trump’s pick for this sensitive post was under scrutiny, Obama’s adviser was doing opposition research which involved data mining classified intelligence reports. Rice requested the unmasking of names, something only three people, according to Circa, were authorized to do:

Dozens of times in 2016, those intelligence reports identified Americans who were directly intercepted talking to foreign sources or were the subject of conversations between two or more monitored foreign figures. Sometimes the Americans’ names were officially unmasked; other times they were so specifically described in the reports that their identities were readily discernible. Among those cleared to request and consume unmasked NSA-based intelligence reports about U.S. citizens were Obama’s national security adviser Susan Rice, his CIA Director John Brennan and then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch.

The Judiciary Committee sent Neil Gorsuch’s Supreme Court nomination to the full Senate Monday on an 11-9 “party-line vote,” as the press likes to say. What a shame. All nine committee Democrats lined up like the Rockettes to oppose the nominee whose qualifications and temperament are universally hailed.

At least 41 Democrats led by Minority Leader Chuck Schumer have also committed to filibuster Judge Gorsuch on the Senate floor, so he will need 60 votes to be confirmed. This will force Republicans to change Senate rules to break what would be the first partisan filibuster of a Supreme Court nominee in history. Democrats and their media friends want to portray Republicans as the radicals in this case, but Democrats are the precedent-busters.

Mr. Schumer is howling that Republicans stole this Court seat because they didn’t give a vote to Merrick Garland last year. But Majority Leader Mitch McConnell declared before Barack Obama nominated Judge Garland that there would be no vote on any nominee in the election year. He was merely echoing the standard that Mr. Schumer had set when he declared in 2007 that Democrats would block any nominee that George W. Bush would send up in his final year as President.

Democrats have no good reason to oppose Judge Gorsuch so they are inventing bad reasons. Montana Democrat Jon Tester, who likes to portray himself as a centrist, announced that he’ll oppose the judge for what he didn’t say. “I cannot support a nominee who refuses to answer important questions,” he said, as if more than 2,000 Gorsuch opinions don’t provide enough insight into his jurisprudence. If the Judge wasn’t as gabby in the confirmation hearing as Mr. Tester would like, the reason is that Democrats would have used anything provocative he said to defeat him. But now even saying nothing offensive is disqualifying. What a crew.